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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My very best wishes to all our readers for a very happy New Year.
By way of clarification, the reference ‘New Year’ is based upon the standard, current, accepted Western Calendar which is not to say that the Western Calendar is in any way preferable or superior to any other form of Calendar be it religious, cultural, historical, scientific or regional and which may or may not be recognised by any other person, group of persons, organisation or self-defining community based either in a particular jurisdiction or transnational.
Please note that this greeting in no way implies any judgement against any other days which may or may not be recognised by any other party as marking the beginning of a new year or any implication that any such recognition, and any celebratory rituals that may or may accompany such recognition is, in any way, less valid or worthy of respect.
Furthermore, the extension of best wishes does not imply any obligation of acceptance or reciprocity in any form from any person or persons or other parties who do not recognise the standard new year or who do not recognise or celebrate the turning of any year (howsoever defined) or who may recognise (whether officially or informally) either the standard new year or any substantially similar event without the need for good wishes or by means of the customary extension of other greetings or forms of accepted social coda.
Finally, the use of the term ‘happy’ refers merely to a state of emotional being that may or may not be transient and acceptance of the best wishes does not imply any requirement on the part of the acceptee to be either in a state of happiness or arrange their affairs in such a way as to induce a state of happiness either in whole or in part. Nor does use of the term ‘happy’ imply that any alternative or different state of emotional being or emotional response is any less valid and the use of the term ‘happy’ (whether accepted with best wishes or not) should not be construed as any declaration that happiness is either a superior or desirable state of mind.
Thank you.
The tsunami disaster in Asia appears to have spawned something of a pissing contest in the West:
The US plans to increase by 10-fold – to $350m – its contribution to help the survivors of the Indian Ocean tsunami.
The largest pledge so far was made just before talks between senior US and UN figures on co-ordinating aid efforts.
HMG may now be forced to raise its own bid. And the French. And the Germans, And the Japanese. And the Australians. And then the Americans will feel obliged to up the ante again in this unseemly ‘my-foreign-aid-dick-is-bigger-than-yours’ antler-lock.
And people call me cynical!
Polly Toynbee gets her priorities right:
Social democracy and global cooperation are struggling under the tsunami of US neoconservatism.
Few things in life are as reliable as the Guardian.
Of all the criticisms of the War on Terror (and there are many legitimate ones), at least there appears to be no intention on the part of the prosecutors to deliberately target children.
Alas, the same cannot be said for the War on Drugs:
PUPILS at a secondary school will undergo random drug testing when they return from the Christmas holiday next week in what is believed to be the first state scheme of its kind.
Students as young as 11 at The Abbey School in Faversham, Kent, will have mouth swabs taken to detect the use of drugs including cannabis, cocaine and Ecstasy, Peter Walker, the headmaster, said.
Oh but why settle for all these namby-pamby, milquetoast, half-measures? There is only one sure way to stop children taking drugs: kill them.
Yes, that’s it! Kill the little bastards. Think of all the valuable police and court time it will save, not to mention precious and overstretched NHS resources.
Kill them all now. You know it makes sense. If it saves just one child from a life on drugs it’s worth it. It’s for their own good. It’s called ‘tough love’…etc…etc… (adding shopworn cliches infinitum).
We interrupt your regular blogging schedule to bring you an important government announcement:
Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, starts his new job vowing business as usual and refusing to reconsider plans for the controversial and expensive ID cards.
Mr Clarke promised “continuity” of his predecessor’s policies.
Thank you for listening and have a nice day.
If foreign aid is the process of taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries, then Band Aid is the process of taking money from gullible people in rich countries and giving it to cunning people in those same rich countries:
The new version of the Band Aid song Do They Know It’s Christmas? has gone straight in at number one in the UK singles chart.
The charity record is also tipped to be this year’s Christmas number one.
Two decades after the original Big Top and the Circus of Guilt comes rolling into town again though I am relieved to note the distinct absence of national fanfare and clappy-happy exultation that accompanied the first great feast of famine back in the mid 1980’s. Twenty years on and my stomach is still churning from the experience.
But this time I have even further cause for complaint. Christmas? Christmas??!!. Just what message are these insensitive, monocultural, fascist bastards trying to send here? This is just Vocal Imperialism, pure and simple.
Less pure and less simple, I wager, are the motives of the organisers. Two of the prominent names are Bob Geldof and Bono, both ageing rockers who have managed to sustain lucrative careers long past their sell-by dates by successfully reinventing themselves as saviours of the planet. Hey, it’s all about getting down the with kidz, man. Or something. To me, they have more in common with American TV evangelists. They also promise salvation provided you send them your money.
Lining up alongside them are a rabble of pasty-faced no-talents, has-beens, wannabes and never-wases: a million mediocrity march. But together they can make a big noise and that matters a lot in an industry where the noisiest wins. In fact, if they owe anything to Africans at all then it is not spurious Christmas wishes but a royalty cheque and a big thank you for being the best marketing tool in the world.
I will be keeping my loose change in my pocket where it belongs this festive season. I have not lost a single night of sleep over Africa and I never will. In fact, I could even cash in on my conscience by starting a record label called ‘Truth in Music’. My first single release will be called ‘I Don’t Give a Hoot About The Starving’. All profits go to me. It may not be the stuff that dreams are made on but, by George, it will have integrity.
Roll up, roll up ladies and gentlemen! Book your tickets for a day or two in the verdant British countryside where you will find thrills, spills, adventures, games, rides, puzzles, jokes, wheezes, teases, conundrums and wonders to behold:
The new law banning hunting with dogs is “so poorly drafted” no-one can define the offence, pro-hunt MPs say.
The accusation came after it emerged a Devon man had been told he could use his four dogs to “chase away unwanted animals” from his farm.
Because he did not intend to kill deer or foxes it was not hunting…..
Tory MP Peter Luff, another co-chairman of Middle Way, said that the legislation was “so poorly drafted nobody appears able to properly define the offence”.
“It is no wonder the government desperately wants to move on from this disastrous law. However, I seriously doubt the countryside will be that accommodating.”
Guaranteed fun for all the family.
Well, well, well. A famous showbusiness celebrity is making a big fuss about the crushing of dissent and the stifling of free speech.
But, this time, the claim has merit:
Blackadder star Rowan Atkinson has launched a comedians’ campaign against a government bill to outlaw inciting religious hatred.
The Mr Bean actor says parts of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill are “wholly inappropriate” and could stifle freedom of speech….
The main thrust of the bill creates a new Serious and Organised Crime Agency to tackle drug trafficking, people smuggling and criminal gangs.
Quite what religious ‘hatred’ has to do with drug trafficking and criminal gangs is quite beyond me but this appears to be another example of the government bundling up huge sheafs of seen-to-be-doing-something new laws and stuffing them altogether into one big, deliverable package. Perhaps they are trying to cut down on their printing costs.
Anyway, to the meat of the matter. I applaud Mr Atkinson for his taking a stand notwithstanding that it may be motivated by self-interest. That is still better than nothing. However, I expect that his pleadings will fall on wilfully deaf ears. HMG was rattling its sabre about new ‘hate speech’ laws even while the cement dust was still drfiting over New York. It was, near as dammit, their first response.
I have not yet read the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill but, in due course, I will. I do not expect that it will materially differ, either in theme or content, from similar recent legislative atrocities. That is to say, it will endow the state with sweeping new powers, give birth to lavishly funded and unaccountable agencies and usher in a whole raft of new laws that will be so widely and vaguely drafted as to make them dangerously open to interpretation and judicial activism.
Following the now familiar pattern of previous legislation, widespread enforcement will prove impossible. So enforcement will be selective, politically-motivated and high-profile with a handful of unlucky short-straw drawers nailed to the wall pour encourages les autres.
If that was the only outcome then it would be bad enough. That alone would be sufficiently capricious and despotic. But that is only the intended outcome. The unintended outcome could be a great deal worse.
A climate of cowed silence doth not a happy-clappy country make. The worst of it is not knowing where the boundaries are. What can we say? What can’t we say? The majority with something to lose will opt for saying nothing at all as the safest policy (and who can blame them?). Thus, there will be a Potemkin appearance of normality and what we have learned to refer to as ‘tolerance’.
But, underneath, the true picture will be much darker. The only way to successfully challenge bad ideas is to challenge them with good ideas but that is not possible to do if the bad ideas cannot be expressed in the first place. Similarly, resentments left unspoken do not simply whither on the vine and grievances (however irrational and baseless they may be) will not conveniently decay into half-lives like radioactive materials.
Instead these unstable elements will foment and fester and bubble away quietly in the dark until the solution has been transformed into a toxic and explosive substance. It will remain inert only so long as the lid can be kept firmly screwed down.
I am given to understand that the art of being a successful confidence trickster lies in the ability to identify what their victims really, really want and then plausibly appearing to offer it to them.
This con artist knew exactly what his ‘mark’ wanted and he offered it up to them on a plate:
The BBC was forced to apologise yesterday for a story claiming that tens of thousands of victims of the Bhopal gas disaster and their families would receive compensation from a $12 billion fund.
A man purporting to speak for the Dow Chemical company told the BBC that its Union Carbide subsidiary, which owned the chemical plant when the gas leak killed 3,500 people immediately and later up to 15,000, would be liquidated and the proceeds used for compensation….
The programme was aired twice on BBC World and followed up on Radio 4 and BBC News 24 causing Dow Chemical’s shares to fall 3.4 per cent in Frankfurt before it was discovered that the whole thing was a hoax.
When the victims of con men recount their tales of woe, it nearly always results in the same charge: ‘How could you have fallen for that’? The answer is always the same: the victim believed what they were told because they wanted to believe it.
On the face of it, a claim that a major global concern was going to fall on its collective sword is wholly implausible. At the very least it is the kind of claim that begs for verification; verification that could easily have been sought by means a quick and expedient telephone call to the company’s headquarters and which would have resulted in dismissal.
But that telephone call was never made because the apparent admission of guilt by Dow Chemicals had set BBC hearts-a-flutter. In their minds, Dow Chemicals is guilty, regardless of any facts to do with the Bhopal disaster. Dow is guilty of profiteering, of raping the planet, of making evil chemicals, of being a multinational corporation, of being big. All of a sudden they get an iron-clad confession from the Beast itself: an unimpeachable confirmation and reinforcement of everything that BBC journos believe as Gospel.
They sought no corroboration for the claim because they wanted it to be true. They needed it to be true and, like lovesick adolescent girls who swoon for the duplicitous declarations of love from disingenuous paramours, they gladly opened their legs.
This grubby little incident is a snapshot of everything that is wrong with the Fourth Estate and the BBC bit of it in particular. It is not they are negligent or dishonest but neither are they objective and therein lies the problem.
Given the disproportionately high incidence of entertainers who march in lockstep with the fashionable leftoid tendency, I think it is forgiveable to regard to the word ‘actor’ as being synonymous with the word ‘moonbat’.
And mostly this is true. Mostly, but not entirely. Earlier in the week, I was watching a BBC ‘Hardtalk’ interview with Oscar-winning British actor, Jeremy Irons, who served up a welcome surprise:
Irons also spoke passionately about his defence of hunting. Irons hunts in Ireland and said he believes that people should be allowed to do what they want as long as they don’t harm other people.
“I’m appalled that really for political reasons Tony Blair is allowing his back benchers, who are bored, who have no power and want to stir it up.
“They want to get back at the way the Tories dealt with the miners, so they think they’ll ban the nobs hunting.”
I doubt very much that Mr. Irons is shaping up to become the British Ronald Reagan but it is gratifying to know that he is out there anyway. Creative talent and the power of reason are not mutually exclusive characteristics.
Travelling to distant lands often has the effect of changing your perspectives about your own country to some degree or other. After returning to Britain from my trip to the USA earlier this week, I was struck by how leaden and grey London appears in November compared to the pastel, azure balminess of the California coast.
But, that said, I was born here in Blighty and I have had a lifetime of getting used to its forbidding and dismal winter skies. Besides, there are other and newer characteristics that make me wonder exactly what type of country I have returned to. They are altogether more pernicious and have nothing to do with the climate:
In the aftermath of my experience, I started some purely anecdotal research on the type of behaviour and attitude displayed by the police towards me. In speaking to friends, acquaintances, tradesmen, cab drivers and people in the pub I rapidly came to realise that a quite staggering number of ordinary, law-abiding people had endured similar experiences.
To discover precisely what ‘experiences’ the author was forced to endure, you will need to read the entire article. I recommend it in particular to our non-British readers so that they can get some idea of what is happening to this country.
The account of the ordeal left me with a ball of cold mercury in the pit of my stomach. For what happened to him could just as easily happen to me or any number of my friends, relations or colleagues.
And this is merely a taste of things to come. The hors d’oeuvres before the main course. We will not enjoy this meal.
Another enforced absence from regular blogging can be explained (if not necessarily forgiven) by my currently being in Northern California on business.
Yes, here I am in downtown Monterey, seated at a table in ‘Bay Books’ internet cafe on the corner of Alvarado and Franklin.
While the climate is most agreeable, I must just say that this is not at all what I was expecting to find in ‘George Bush’s Amerikkka’. I have been here for very nearly a week now and I have not stumbled across a single Gulag. Perhaps they are all very well hidden. And if there are any Fascist Death Squads operating in the area, then the report of their rifles are being drowned out by the barking of the seals in Monterey Bay.
In fact, the only visibly disturbing characteristics of this place are a few too many ageing hippies and a zealous crusade against smokers. There are, however, compensations. It is mid-November and I can walk about in shirtsleeves during the day.
I cannot honestly say that I am enjoying myself but that is only because I have such a busy work schedule. I can say that I look forward to coming back here again.
I will be returning to Blighty early next week whereupon normal service will resume.
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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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