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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I just came across this bit of news :
Assailants have gouged out the eyes of three brothers in central Pakistan in revenge for a similar incident 16 years ago. The brothers were kidnapped by 14 members of rival clans from the village of Kabirwala in the central province of Punjab on Monday night, police quoted relatives as saying, the Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) reported.
They were taken to another village where their eyes were gouged out “with a knife one by one…the brothers were in critical condition in hospital. …The attack was apparently in revenge for an attack 16 years ago blamed on the brothers’ family. No one had so far been arrested.
I do not know whether such incidents get reported mainly because of the spotlights directed at islamic and muslim societies or whether they are normal ocurrance, part of the fabric of society. I find such acts abhorent, although in principle I support individual’s taking justice into his own hands where the state or appropriate authorities fail him.
Also, the right to retribution should not diminsh with time, so 16 year delay would not necessarily bother me. But exacting revenge in the form of mutilation that is sponsored by a clan and carried out in the context of collective guilt, undermines the right of individual in that society to fair trial and proportionate punishment. It is barbarism, pure and simple.
Salam Pax has posted again. Well, not quite. Someone has posted in his name. Interesting observations, insider story, basically a gripping read straight from Baghdad. Go and raed…
Yesterday’s post about the mean and stupid RIAA has created some debate in the comments section. And in the meantime, the RIAA has a few more nasty tricks up its sleeve. ZDNet reports:
Some of the world’s largest record labels are quietly financing the creation of programs by small software firms that, if implemented, would sabotage the computers and Internet connections of people who download pirated music, according to a published report.
To those who argue that laws should be obeyed ‘coz that’s what they are there for:
Citing industry executives, The New York Times reported in an article that appeared on its Web site on Saturday, that the efforts bear varying degrees of legality including attacking a computer’s Internet connection to slow or halt downloads and overwhelming distribution networks with programs that masquerade as music files. [Trojan horses and viruses]
To those who venerate the Constitution and let it inspire their opinions about the changing reality of copyright enforcement:
Last month a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that file-sharing services Grokster and Morpheus were not guilty of copyright infringement.
If upheld, the ruling on Grokster and Morpheus could make it harder for the record industry to go after technology that allows people to trade files, provided the companies that offer such tools have no control over how their technology is used. As a result, record companies are going to have to find other targets for their legal wrath.
Perhaps legal intimidation, coupled with ‘aggressive’ technology may be effective for a while, but the ‘problem’ with technology is that somewhere, quite soon, one or more clever little buggers will find a way around it. Turning nasty to those who want to listen to music, i.e. record companies’ actual markets, does not strike me as the best business strategy. Free markets mean that the players are able to freely satisfy the demand they identify. It does not mean violation of property rights and free-for-all but I cannot accept that is what the RIAA is fighting against. Their desperate efforts to recoup losses has far more to do with overpriced contracts with top chart artists, bloated marketing budgets and costly advertising wars about places in the very top charts that make the artists so expensive, than with any copyright infringements.
If you are a business in free markets and a new phenomenon emerges that may just jeopardise your distribution system (in this case, internet and P2P replacing CDs and other off-line media), you do not go around intimidating your current, former and potential customers. You find a way of accommodating that demand, adjusting your business model or finding an alternative way to satisfy it. That’s free market to me!
As Michael Page, an attorney who represented the defendants in the Grokster and Morpheus case predicts:
It puts pressure on the labels to take seriously that the public wants electronic distribution. They’re going to have to stop trying to figure out a way to make the Internet go away and figure out a way to use it.
Perhaps, unless you think you have enough muscle to try to curb the markets and customer behaviour and make sure that your oligopoly prevents any new entrants from making impact on the balance of power in the industry. Oh wait, that sounds just like the RIAA…
This debate is not exactly about copyright and intellectual property. The reason we are having it is that it is easier for the RIAA to go the route of legal intimidation and obstreperousness (the US is, after all, the land of lawyers) than giving in to more uncertain and painful pressures of market forces and customer demand. Oh, and of progress and technological development…
Note to our ‘in-house’ entertainment industry expert: Is this what you had in mind, Simon? Surely not.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued four students separately last month for running services that searched computers connected to their college networks for MP3 song files. It may not be headline news material, but to me this is as scary as any other infringment on freedom of the individual. ZDNet reports that the students have agreed to pay around £10,000 each to settle online music piracy charges from the recording industry.
The service that one of the students run at Princeton university was more like Google than Napster, since it had simply searched computers that were hooked up to the campus network, whether or not they contained his software. The students also shared copyrighted music from their own machines. This case is important in that it is the first time the RIAA directly sued individuals, as opposed to companies, associated with what is called peer-to-peer piracy.
The settlement was reached without defendants admitting guilt. Each of them will be paying RIAA an amount totalling between $12,000 and $17,000 (£7,456 and £10,563), split into annual instalments between 2003 and 2006. The lawsuits as filed could have entailed damages (in theory) of up to $100m.
Matt Oppenheim, RIAA senior vice president issued a statement:
We believe it’s in everyone’s best interest to come to a quick resolution, and that these four defendants now clearly understand the seriousness with which we view this type of illegal behaviour. We have also sent a clear signal to others that this kind of activity is illegal.
According to the RIAA said that any future similar enforcement actions could lead to “stiffer settlement obligations”.
Now, I am not against copyright and intellectual property rights. I am, however, against a large entity using desperate measures to halt its falling profit margins. The music industry sales are falling not because people are copying music they ‘should be paying for’ but because the industry’s business models are no longer viable. For the RIAA to sue companies or individuals is like for an elephant to swat a few flies in the swarm. It can and will obliterate the few it hits but it can’t squash them all…
Reuters reports:
A bag of powdered garlic, not something that would normally offend the French, set alarm bells ringing when it was left on a plane at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport and officials were unable to identify the substance.
The bag found on a US Airways plane which arrived from Orlando on Sunday sparked a security alert when police feared the whitish-grey powder inside could be a deadly toxin.
The abandoned hand luggage was taken away for laboratory analysis and several people who had approached it were taken to hospital for tests. However, the contents were found to be an innocuous stash of powdered garlic and other spices, which the owner later returned to collect.
The false alert came days after officials said an amount of powder found at a Paris train station and initially believed to be the lethal poison ricin appeared to be pulverised wheat and barley. France has been on high alert in recent months amid fears of attacks by Islamic radicals.
Yesterday was Ba’ath party anniversary. The Iraq Press, opposition press agency, notes that for the first time in 35 years it was ignored as there were no authorities to force Iraqis to mark the founding anniversary of the ruling party in the traditional manner.
Streets were festooned with ribbons and Saddam Hussein’s monuments, statues and murals, found almost at every corner in Iraq, were decorated and hundreds of thousands of copies of his glossy and color pictures distributed.
Radio and television glared with anthems and songs in praise of the great leader. The festivities were only a harbinger of the nation-wide gala celebrations that took place in Iraq on April 28 to mark Saddam’s birthday.
This year, for the first time in 35 years, Iraqis will be not be “forcibly bussed to his hometown of Tikrit for an orchestrated demonstration to show the world how the Iraqi people loved their great leader.”
I do like the sound of these words:
The whole of April was a period in which the authorities were busy unveiling one statue of Saddam after another, one mural after another and one monument after another.
But now no new statues or murals are erected. Instead they are being pulled down and smashed across the country.
The western public will never understand the full horrific impact of a personality cult. They may see the prisons, torture chambers and hear the disturbing discriptions of individual tragedies. But they will not be able to comprehend just how pervasive propaganda of a regime built around an individual can become. My impression is that people imagine it is more of a public affair and if you do not read the newspaper or watch TV, you can more or less ignore it. A sort of celebrity craze that you can laugh off in the privacy of your home. Or filter it out, like the bias of western media.
But it is not like that, regime propaganda is everywhere, at work, in public and communal life. It follows you home, interferes with all aspects of your life – making sense of the world, relating to your family, bringing up your children. It employs personal and innocuous images, hijacks most wholesome and normal features of your life – celebrating birthdays, dating, having fun, making friends with your neighbours…
The coalition forces and western journalists ought to have in mind, when they encounter the locals, the regime’s ‘mind control’ techniques used on the population and habitually backed by force. They should remember that these people have been subjected to Saddam’s propaganda machine for the last three decades. Their way of thinking is not going to change in 20 days although the reality around them will have done. It will take a long time for them to learn to appreciate the kind of freedom we take for granted. I do not wish to insult Iraqis by suggesting that they will not rejoice at the absence of oppression and appreciate their new found freedom. It is their understanding of individual rights as applied to everyone, not only those who can enforce them for themselves by violence or connections, that may take a generation or two to sink in.
But for me that is the whole point of liberating Iraq.
The older media generation, particularly those covering the war from comfortable television studios, has not covered itself with glory. Deeply infected with anti-war feeling and Left-wing antipathy to the use of force as a means of doing good, it has once again sought to depict the achievements of the West’s servicemen as a subject for disapproval.
– John Keegan, Telegraph
Breaking news – Kuwait.
Iraq has launched a new type of Scud missile at the coalition forces deployed in Kuwait. Details are sketchy at this time, but it appears to be a new and improved Scud type missile. The CIA is investigating just how and from whom Saddam acquired this new technology.
Ode to British Armed Forces:
Yesterday, in Basra, we were reminded. Our soldiers conducted themselves with courage, patience, discipline and, when necessary, appropriately directed violence. They were splendid.
[…]
…as they advanced through Basra’s suburbs, our Servicemen had to rely on older attributes: unit cohesiveness, steadiness under fire, controlled aggression, trust in each other. Strip away all the artefacts of modern war and we are left with an undeniable truth: man for man, our soldiers are better, braver and deadlier than theirs.
By yesterday afternoon, American commentators were hailing the pacification of Basra as a model for what should happen in Baghdad. To have occupied a city of 1.2 million people with negligible casualties to the attacker is extraordinary; to have done so without incurring the hatred of the inhabitants is little short of providential.
Britain’s standing in the United States is as high as it has ever been, and with good reason.
As a former prime minister once put it: “Rejoice – just rejoice!”
A Civitas report on crime, ominously called The Failure of Britain’s Police, argues that forces of law and order have lost control. Police in Britain are so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of crime that even recent extra recruits are making no difference according to the report published today.
The comparison with New York figures is startling. In 1991 there were 22,000 robberies in London. In 2002 there were 44,600, an increase of 105 per cent. In 1991 there were 99,000 robberies in New York City. In 2002 there were 27,000, a decrease of 73 per cent. To draw equal with New York’s achievement, London would thus have to gain no fewer than 178 percentage points in its fight against street crime.
The report concludes that to halt the rising levels of street crime, substantial increases in numbers of policemen, as seen in New York, are necessary. Zero tolence policing is called for to set clear boundaries and re-take the public places from anti-social elements.
However, that has not been the Home office’s priority. Their approach is predictable:
In the face of staggering volumes of crime, the police and the Home Office are reduced to ‘bringing crime under control’ by legalising or decriminalising many offences on the grounds that they aren’t so bad after all.
Oh, and here is the government’s story about crime figures. Crime is 9 per cent down and believe this, if you can:
These figures show Government measures to reduce crime are working. Crime is continuing a downward trend and the risk of being a victim remains at its lowest level for 20 years.
I know whether I feel safe in London or not. How about this radical solution – allow people defend themselves!
Mark Steyn is in good form in today’s Telegraph. Reading the opening paragraph of his opinion piece whilst having afternoon coffee, I had to struggle to contain its flow…
This war is over. The only question now is whether a new provisional government is installed before the BBC and The New York Times have finished running their exhaustive series on What Went Wrong with the Pentagon’s Failed War Plan and while The Independent’s Saddamite buffoon Robert Fisk is still panting his orgasmic paeans to the impenetrability of Baghdad’s defences and huffily insisting there are no Americans at the airport even as the Saddam International signs are being torn down and replaced with Rumsfeld International.
And another dig at the blogosphere’s favourite punchbag:
As I wrote back then, apropos Robert Fisk’s massive bulk loo-paper purchase in the run-up to war, “I can’t say this strikes me as a 25-roll war”. By the time you read this, Tariq Aziz and the last five Ba’athists in Baghdad may be holed up in Fisk’s Ba’athroom, and he’ll be hailing the genius of their plan to lure the Americans to their doom by leaving his loo rolls on the stairwell for the Marines to slip on.
A follow up on the yesterday’s article about the EU constitution. In today’s Telegraph’s opinion section, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is concerned that “while we liberate Iraq, Europe is busy planning to enslave us”:
The EU will no longer be a treaty organisation in which member states agree to lend power to Brussels for certain purposes, on the understanding that they can take it back again. The EU itself will become the fount of power, with its own legal personality, delegating functions back to Britain. Draft Article 9 puts Brussels at the top of the pyramid. “The Constitution will have primacy over the law of Member States,” it says.
The new order may also be irreversible. Article 46 stipulates that the terms of secession from the EU must be agreed by two thirds of the member states. In other words, one third can impose intolerable conditions.
We can already see the impact of the EU fiasco in handling the Iraq crisis:
The EU will have the power to “co-ordinate the economic policies of the member states” and – showing some chutzpah given what happened over Iraq – “define and implement a common foreign and security policy, including the progressive framing of a common defence policy”.
And there is a bit about, Tony Blair, our hero:
Tony Blair was slow to see the threat. Downing Street at first dismissed the convention as a talking shop, but woke up when the French, Spanish, German and Italian governments gave it irresistible authority by appointing to it their foreign or deputy prime ministers.
The Government then fell back to a second self-deception, imagining that France and Spain would join Britain in blocking any major assault on national prerogatives.
[…]
None of this has happened. France has abandoned Britain, and her own historical attachment to a Europe where national capitals always have the whip hand over Brussels. They seem to be accepting federalism as the price of relaunching the broken Franco-German axis. As for the Spanish, they are silent.
Scary stuff, please go and read the whole article.
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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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