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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I walked past the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service in Victoria Street yesterday and saw giant banners telling citizens not to call the emergency services number 999. The advice was that “unless a crime is being committed or a person is in immediate danger” one should call the local police station.
If I understand this notice correctly, if I should observe a murder being committed in the street outside my window, and I am quite sure the victim is dead (e.g. by being decapitated with a machete), and the murderer flees the scene of the crime, then I must not call the emergency services or risk being arrested for wasting valuable police time. Instead I should attempt to contact my local police station which is normally either shut, or the fearless crimefighters are hiding in back offices compiling hate crime statistics. As the typical response time for calling my local police station is never (at least on the three occasions in the past five years that I tried that route), this means that the police don’t want forensic evidence, and the corpse is presumably a problem for the road sweepers.
With the abolition of the right to silence, police licence to shoot people in the street for no good reason, and the removal of double jeopardy, there doesn’t seem to be much point in wasting time on detective work to actually try to find out who is really committing a crime.
Meanwhile hate crimes have their own hotline. This is useful. I’ve been bored with the usual tiresome ethnic jokes for some time. The fact that one can be arrested for telling a joke which someone finds offensive on the grounds of race, gender, and sexuality will obviously make London a safer place to live.
Whig interventionist is a term one could use to describe a partisan of limited government who supports war against tyranny. The problem is deciding on the right target.
UK versus USA
The unilateral decision to impose tariffs on steel by the US president in 2002 was an action which in the nineteenth century might have triggered a war. In this case the UK would unquestionably be the forces of enlightenment and the US the agent of darkness. As far as I have been able to establish, Iraq has no import tariffs.
France versus UK
I recently called for a British War on Chirac. Yet I would have to support a French war of liberation if the causus belli was alcohol prohibition. When taking a ferry to France, the bars and cheap alcohol shops are closed for the first 20 minutes, as long as the ferry is notionally in British territorial waters. Yet they stay open for the rest of the trip until the ship docks in a French port.
Coming back, the scenario is reversed. The shops open at once leaving France and close 20 minutes before landing in the UK. Considering that both countries supposedly operate identical European Union regulations on tax-free trade, this looks like the sort of provocation that China caused to trigger the Opium Wars.
Better still the French authorities do not care how much discounted alcohol and tobacco people carry, the British Gestapo consider 2,000 cigarettes to be organised crime.
In the UK it is illegal to sell alcohol after 11pm without a meal. In France it is illegal to sell a meal after 9pm unless alcohol is available.
French visitors to London now play spot the police camera.
I rest my case.
“Congress Falls to Republicans” is how the BBC reports the catastrophic news to impartial observers (or should that be left-wing activists?).
Jeb Bush holds on to the Florida governorship.
President Bush may be a vicious protectionist, but I can’t help feeling that this is one of those days for quiet gloating. Or should that be overt mirth?
Not only has monitoring the real level of crime in the UK failed but the deterrence value of the law grows weaker by the day.
The main reason that a burglar has a one in five hundred chance of spending three months or more in prison is the “efforts” of the Crown Prosecution Service. I have often thought that if one were to burn all the graduates of the Ecole Normale de l’Administration, that the Gross National Product of France would rocket. In the case of the Crown Prosecution Service, its staff are too soggy to serve as fuel. However, the removal of that bunch of hopeless failed lawyers (think about it) from the gene pool would doubtless lead to a drop in crime.
The bungling over the prosecution of Paul Burrell last week is a case in point. Let’s not forget either that these are the people who prosecute shopkeepers for selling a pound of bananas to someone who asks for them and who decide that Tony Martin is a criminal.
Readers will have noted my opposition to a British war against Iraq.
The war of words between the British Prime Minister and the French President is another matter.
One of the simple rules I have in life is that, on any issue, before knowing the facts, if there is a dispute between Jacques Chirac and anyone else (Al Gore, Pol Pot, Lady Thatcher, Satan or even Bill Clinton), I know who is in the wrong and lying through his teeth, and lacking in diplomatic finesse.
In 27 years I have yet to be wrong even once.
In 1975, Jacques Chirac presided over France’s worst ever budget deficit, trade deficit, social security deficit, unemployment rise and tax increases. He proudly announced that the economic crisis was over. It was soon over for him as he was sacked as Prime Minister.
In 1981, when the Socialist government actually managed to equal Mr Chirac’s earlier disastrous economic performance, he described it as “an un-precedented idiocy”…
In 1986, Jacques Chirac won an election to become prime minister on a platform of Thatcherite reforms. Within weeks he was describing Mrs Thatcher in public as “une c******”, a description that was extremely vulgar and biologically impossible for a woman.
In 1991, Jacques Chirac promised to fight against the Maastricht Treaty by campaigning for the “No” campaign. Within days he had declared himself first neutral, then thrown his enthusiastic support for the “Yes” campaign, claiming that he would be more important if the referendum was narrowly won with his support, then if it was defeated massively with his opposition.
In 1992 on the bicentenary of the execution of King Louis XVI, a group of royalists asked for permission to lay a wreath in the place de la Concorde. Mayor of Paris Jacques Chirac tried (but failed) to prevent them from doing so. Having antagonised the royalists, Mr Chirac made no comment about the violent anti-royalists who attacked police and passers-by at the event.
In 1995, Jacques Chirac (now President) asked the mayor of Le Havre (a party colleague) not to play the Marseillaise at the opening of a new memorial. The mayor promptly cancelled the president’s invitation.
In 2002, Mr Chirac made 97 promises as part of his presidential re-election campaign. It will come as no surprise to learn that over 90% of them were calls for higher state spending or political correctness, or more eco-fascism.
Even the small steps being made in the right direction by Mr Chirac’s new prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin have either been in contradiction with Mr Chirac’s promises, or been the object public doubts expressed by the President.
Finally, on those areas where there has been some sense made by the French government this year: crackdown on terror networks, better security at the Channel tunnel, closing the Sangatte refugee camp, Mr Chirac hasn’t said a word.
I note that unlike Saddam Hussein, Mr Chirac actually has a sizable nuclear arsenal (the third largest in the world). He is certainly a bigger threat to free trade. I’m more optimistic that Chirac’s successor would be an improvement than that Saddam’s would be. And the best bit of all is that once removed there’s bound to be some pretext for locking Chirac up for a long time… and I haven’t even mentioned the corruption.
Leave Iraq to the US Mr Blair, liberate France now!
“Vive la France libre!”
Hallow’een is bigger in Paris than London. To prove the point, I’m off to Paris for this year’s event. To save money on a hotel and because of my extra late booking, I’m taking the overnight coach.
Whilst buying my make-up, (yes I do need some make-up to look like Uncle Fester) I realised why the party is more popular in Frace than the Uk and it illustrates perfectly the law of unintended consequences.
France is notionally a Catholic country, so All Saints’ Day (All Hallows) is a public holiday. The night before is Hallow’een, a celebration of the night when all the fiends of hell rise up.
The UK is not a Catholic country, so All Saints’ Day is not a day off work, so partying late on Hallow’een doesn’t work as well. So if the Christian supremacists hadn’t got the day off and forced it on everyone else, hedonistic party-goers wouldn’t have the opportunity to dance naked around sacrificial chickens.
Oh dear! How tragic.
Taking a bus to Brixton from Streatham this afternoon, I saw the Big Brother posters which assured me I was safe. Considering I was in one of London’s three murder hotspots, the posters seemed appropriate. In Coldharbour Lane the new multimedia telephone kiosks were empty yet there were queues outside them. These were the drugs hustlers who called out “Grass”, “Charlie” and “Horse” as I walked past.
Directly beneath a bus lane camera a car blocked the bus lane. I was reminded that when the security cameras were installed in Coldharbour Lane one of them didn’t work. Any guesses where a murder was committed? Yup, directly beneath the faulty camera.
In Kingston-upon-Thames a few years ago a jeweller’s shop was discovered to be the only shop in the street which couldn’t be seen from the array of cameras. A nice dark alleyway running alongside was also unaccountably off-screen. Any guesses how this was discovered? Yup, when a gang burgled the shop.
At least there is no suggestion that inside information could possibly have contributed to these crimes.
Justice Barker has a curious notion of the law. Last time I thought about wandering the streets of London with a crowbar, I remembered that if I were found to be in possession of such an object, that I would be charged with possesion of a dangerous weapon.
A Londoner was recently shot several times by armed police for carrying a table leg: that murder however was entirely justified, according to one of Mr Justice Barker’s colleagues. So presumably the intruder teleported the crowbar into his victim’s home using equipment from the 25th century.
Also, presumably I would be allowed to carry a machete, crowbar or table leg around Mr Justice Barker’s home at 3am, but not in my front garden at 3pm. Perhaps a group of squatters might like to find out where Mr Barker lives and turn up at about 3am with plumbing tools and invite themselves in for a cup of tea.
I assume that Mr Barker thinks there is no difference between this and the “right to roam”. And to think there are people who want the UK to have more common law? With barking Barkers on the judges’ benches, who could tell the difference?
Anyone believe that a future Conservative government would amnesty self-defence prisoners of conscience? Ha!
‘Gunboat Diplomacy’ has a bad name these days: the idea was that if a gang of killers murdered a British subject in a far-flung country, a gun-boat would be sent out. If the local potentates were considered to be accomplices of the killers, the gunboat would bombard the government palace until the potentates agreed to hand over the killers or execute them locally. Otherwise a joint-punitive expedition would be organised with local involvement.
To the extent that the US supported by the UK, carried out such an operation in Afghanistan last year, I approve. My reasoning is that there was a very clear chain of events which anyone, regardless of which side they support, could understand. As regards Iraq however, no such clarity of purpose exists.
The real justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein is that he is
- a tyrant
- the highest profile Arab government opponent of the West.
Therefore Saddam’s overthrow would demoralise Islamic fundamentalists. But the US government won’t put it this way because it looks too much like an imperialist anti-Arab position. Instead an arbitrary objection to the Iraqi regime’s attempt to build nuclear weapons is invoked, creating an opportunity for the campaign to be side-tracked by the weapons’ inspectors issue. There is no mileage for the British government to get involved in this.
First, never start a war which you would be unable to finish if your allies pulled out: the sad truth is that the UK would lose a war against Iraq, unless Mr Blair launched weapons of mass destruction on Iraq.
Second, war against nuclear proliferation cannot be won. There is first the hypocrisy of letting Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea develop nuclear technology, whilst threatening war on a dictator who is no worse than some of the leaders of all the other nuclear powers (all of them anti-American at various times too). Then there is the fact that this is sixty year old technology. We might as well try to prevent cross-bows or hard-encryption from spreading.
Third, unless the British government gets serious about its own internal terrorist threat: Islamic, eco-terrorist and of course the IRA, what is the point of sending British troops to traipse around the Middle East?
Finally, the equipment is so poor, the fighting capability so stretched, the politics so unrealistic, that sooner or later the British Army is going have another Majuba Hill.
Last Tuesday (Oct 11th) some of the world’s most influential free-market think-tanks met over dinner at Shepherd’s restaurant in Westminster, London. The occasion was the launch of a new French language libertarian think-tank called the Turgot Institute which will be based in Brussels, but aiming at the Francophone world.
Turgot, an 18th century economist and statesman, is generally credited with coining the expression “laissez-faire, laissez-passer” (there is an alternative claim). His economic reforms, blocked by established interests, were probably the last hope for France of avoiding the carnage of the French Revolution.
The think-tanks represented included: Centre for New Europe (Brussels), Institute for Economic Affairs (UK), Independent Institute, Cato Institute, Foundation for Economic Freedom, and Ludwig von Mises Institute (all US), also one Candian and one Flemish whose names I didn’t catch.
150 years ago this is the sort of gathering that would have launched a Communist group in a European country. More news on this development as it breaks.
There’s a market for “date rape” drugs and now a market for “anti-date rape drug” devices. Drink Safe Technology is producing ‘smart coasters’ which sniff chemical interference with drinks.
“You can carry this in your purse, take your drink to the bathroom with you, test it out, and if it comes out positive, you know something’s wrong with that guy you were talking to,” said Janita Patrick, a San Jose State University student. “Keep walking and get away.”
Regarding Dale Amon’s problem of uranium smuggling, he’s right, if the US can’t keep “wetbacks” out, and the UK can’t stop IRA terrorists from crossing from the Irish Republic, what chance for any country with a long, contested land border?
However, does anyone know anything EASIER to track remotely than radioactive isotopes?
If I were a terrorist I would order a truckload of ammonia and another of iodine, and a suitcase of coffee filters. A pistol to detonate the dynamite paste is probably the hardest item to locate in the UK (steal one from a police officer is probably the safest and most inconspicuous method).
In guerrilla warfare the optimum weapon is one that doesn’t break down, and is cheap. This is why the British Army’s SA80 rifle is a good weapon: no one has ever stolen one for terrorist use (because they are expensive and break if you look at them sideways  ). Until someone makes a mass-produced, miniature nuke which is less prone to malfunctions than Microsoft software, I’m not going to worry overmuch about the threat of nuclear terrorist attack.
Just a thought for the paranoia squad: how do you know there haven’t been a dozen dud nukes set off around the world last week in underground car parks? The triggers were just dodgy…
This is my favourite explanation for the non-appearance of Bin Laden: he’s waiting for the b***** things to go off 
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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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