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]
|
Funny that Paul should mention Italian elections; I watched a piece on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Foreign Correspondent tonight that trailed a couple of Australians (I call them Australians, because that’s what they are – not Italians, despite their declarations to the contrary) who have just been elected to the Italian federal parliament under the utterly ridiculous new system that mandates a level of parliamentary representation to “Italians abroad” – that is, emigrants. One of the two men, Nino Randazzo (who’s been an Australian for more than fifty years), nominally supports Romano Prodi’s coalition, however he is seen as a potentially swinging voter in a tightly balanced senate and thus holds power far beyond that which his diminutive stature implies.
Notwithstanding the fact that the legitimacy of these foreign men wielding Italian political power is extraordinarily tenuous, what do these people want from the Italian state? According to one of the two, financial assistance for “cultural purposes” to benefit people who have left Italy to make better lives for themselves in other countries. One newly-elected American member of the Italian parliament declared that Italy somehow owed its émigrés something due to the remittances they voluntarily sent back to Italy many years ago.* The mind boggles. Why, oh why do these privileged foreigners think they have the right to extract funds from the already hard-pressed Italian taxpayer – a group they deserted long ago? Why on earth are Italians not apoplectic with rage over these people who are only going to make the Italian government’s deficit slide further into the red with their demands of cultural grants for foreigners? And we’re talking about foreigners who have already helped create rich Italian cultures in their chosen countries and as a group could effortlessly afford to fund whatever cultural boondoggles these new enemies of the Italian taxpayer have in mind. Of course, most Australian-Italians would not give a cent (Australian or Euro) for these cultural pursuits – whatever they may be. Amazingly, in this circumstance the new Italian electoral system has made it easier to arm-twist a foreign government to do one’s bidding.
You have probably ascertained from my colourful use of formatting that I am a wee bit irritated by the exploits of these men. For a start, I do not like parasitic types who think they have some divine right to expropriate other people’s money. Secondly, I cannot stand those who move to a country like Australia, make their lives here and by all accounts do very well for themselves in a way that they could not have if they’d have stayed in the land of their birth, only to turn around and insult the nation that provided them with so much opportunity and declare “I’m Italian”. There is a simple solution to this problem. The Italians can have their new politicians back. It seems only fair; they are paying for them, after all.
*Apologies for not providing quotes; the programme in question – Foreign Correspondent on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s television channel – tends not to post the transcript of the segment until the day after it’s aired. It will be available here, and when it becomes available I will edit this post accordingly.
I have come across an allegation I am unable to verify because I am a linguistic curmudgeon, unable to read (or even speak!) Swedish or Danish. Sorry, everyone. A late night trawling through a comments thread over at Tim Blair’s unearthed this very interesting comment from reader “TOGITV” :
I have just read that the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten is about to republish the Mohammed cartoons!
I can’t find any reference to it in any English language press. But here is the link to the article in the Swedish press
TOGITV later posts :
I just read the Swedish article a bit closer. It isn’t the same newspaper (Jyllands Posten) that will re-publish the cartoons, it will be another Danish newspaper called Politiken.
I can’t read Danish quite as well as Swedish, but I think the article in Politiken says that Harpers Magazine will also publish the cartoons in their June edition also accompanying an article on Art Spiegelman.
Interesting, if true. Perhaps someone versed in Swedish or Danish could enlighten the rest of us as to the articles’ content. If it is true, and the cartoons are published again in another Danish magazine, the seemingly obvious consequence would be another explosion of fundamentalist Islamic vitriol against Denmark, freedom of speech, the West and Western values, you name it. However, the furore over the Jyllands-Posten cartoons occurred several months after publishing, and was certainly incited by a few conspiring Islamic leaders, who provided the nexus between a liberal European paper and the protesting Middle Eastern mobs. On reflection, it is hard to see what good the rabble-rousing has done for the Islamic cause. In response to the disgusting behaviour of the Islamist mob, the silencing veil of political correctness was blown off various issues surrounding Islam in quite remarkable time. I’ve noticed that the educated middle class – possibly the social group most conscious of PC mores – are these days far more likely to openly discuss and criticise the ugly sides of Islam and its (in)compatibility with modern Western society. I’d go so far to say that, post cartoon-rage, even tracts of the left are less willing to defend Islam’s excesses.
I rather think that those who scurrilously incited the cartoon rage did not expect the mob to claw and bay with such intensity. Certainly, the hideous scenes we witnessed on our televisions at the time turned many erstwhile allies in the West away from the Islamic cause. More importantly, an enormous number who had no opinion one way or the other regarding Islam now see it in a negative light. It is most evident that the individuals who all-too-successfully activated the mob dealt themselves an almighty propaganda defeat – possibly one of the more spectacular tactical backfires we’ve seen in recent times. Surely, even the most benighted, zealous Islamic leader has the limited perspicacity required to concede that point. Hence, if the cartoons are soon published in another Danish newspaper, we may hear nothing more of it.
The details of this story are still unfolding. Irrespective of these, the Dutch appear to have lost a brave, eloquent and credible voice against the backward Islamic extremism that is threatening their liberal traditions.
Ever read something you wrote not all that long ago and pondered how you could have got it so epically wrong? Take this article I wrote last year about forcing the Middle East into a strategic decline. My prescription? Government action – tax breaks, subsidies, strategic state investment; a Keynesian smorgasbord. Ugh! Why did I not think this through more fully? Five years of sky-high oil prices will go an awful long way towards solving the problems mentioned in the article, courtesy of the market. No government meddling required. As it happens, I submitted the essay for a university assignment and received a pleasing mark. A bit regrettable that I felt sticking the bloody thing up around this rather more intellectually rigorous domain was a good idea.
Liberals often talk about the incremental implementation of their creed, envisaging liberal ideals slowly seeping into the mainstream to eventually supplant the will to plan and the will to coerce. I disagree with this prediction of events. The model of the modern developed state will only decline when a popular perception that it is simply unaffordable exists. I contend that such a notion will only be wholly planted in the popular imagination by a sudden, catastrophic failure of the state, of which I believe we will sooner or later experience. This is not an unrealistic prediction; the state-initiated welfare programmes in all their myriad contortions are by nature self-perpetuating and ever-expanding, and thus the parasite will eventually consume so much of the creative juices of its host that the host will starve. This will result in massive social and economic upheaval for an enormous bulk of individuals who had made provisions for the future assuming the existence of government-controlled and distributed social welfare.
Consequently, the modern first world welfare state is in the process of clogging its own arteries. I am envisaging a scenario whereby a critical mass of nonproductive citizens and inadequately funded retirees overwhelm the social security systems of the developed world, causing most (if not all) of these governments to respond in a manner befitting a state hell-bent on survival – namely, progressively increasing taxes. Of course, the majority of future retirees are likely to be underfunded to such an extent that the welfare state, supported by relatively few, could never hope to provide for so many people. However, the period in which this is being realised will see taxes increase, in the vain hope of closing the funding gap, to a level whereby the aforementioned taxes start killing the economic activity that enables taxation revenue to be collected in the first place. Desperately, governments will make increasingly onerous tax imposts on the productive, which will result in collapse – not fiscal equilibrium. I think that the trend towards increasing individual responsibility will find its genesis in a widespread and deeply painful economic catastrophe as severe as any that has gone before; something equal to or greater than the magnitude of the Great Depression, which profoundly and permanently altered the values of so many of those who lived through it. I believe that liberalism’s best chance of popular acceptance will rapidly rise out of fateful ashes like these. → Continue reading: Liberty’s revolution
Sorry to keep banging on about J K Galbraith, but I just had to drag a gem of a BBC Radio 4 radio interview out of this comment thread – thanks to commenter John K (not Galbraith, one assumes) for bringing it to light. The Radio 4 producers were no doubt expecting hushed reverence for a crusty Keynesian warrior like Galbraith – much beloved by most BBC types – so I think they received rather a rude shock when the interviewee, Meghnad Desai, got into his free marketeering stride. My favourite part :
“So Galbraith was very much a 1950s man. And he still has fans, because lots of people are still stuck in the 1950s. You know, quite a lot of them in the Labour Party.”
I also particularly enjoyed the shocked pause before the interviewer, Greg Wood, thanked the eminent Professor for his heresy.
A firm friend of government interference passes on.
I recently had a very interesting chat with my good friend, Steve Edwards, who is currently without his own blog – although probably not for much longer. He is a regular at libertarian.org.au, however. In the course of our conversation, he informed me that HIV risk-of-transmission rates are not nearly as high as I previously thought. Consider this – for every 10 000 exposures to an HIV-infected source, it is estimated 5 will contract HIV via insertive penile-vaginal intercourse. 10 will contract HIV via receptive penile-vaginal intercourse. These figures assume no use of a condom. Click the link for the risk via other routes of exposure.
This got us both thinking about the HIV/AIDS epidemic epicentre of Sub-Saharan Africa. Given the very low rate of HIV transmission through sexual intercourse, is it really feasible that a country like Botswana has an infection rate of 30%+? If the ratio mentioned above is correct, an African male with an average number of vaginal sexual encounters can have unprotected sex with only HIV positive partners for a lifetime and still stand a reasonable chance of not contracting the virus. How could a virus that difficult to catch spread through a population so comprehensively?
I am not saying that HIV/AIDS is not an enormous problem in Africa – of course it is. And I do not discount the anecdotal evidence of health professionals who report a multitude of AIDS orphans and hospitals groaning with AIDS-riddled patients. I am sure this is the case, however from the limited perspective of a person’s experiences, how could they possibly tell if this casualty rate represents 30% of a population of several million or 3%? 10% or 1%? Sick people do tend to cluster in hospitals, and health professionals go where the need is great. Given this working environment for doctors and nurses treating HIV in Africa, they could be forgiven for believing an inflated number. Conversely, if a foreign doctor spent a month in the wealthier parts of Nairobi, they would probably report to the folks back home that they saw no signs of HIV/AIDS at all.
I do not doubt that there is a large amount of research that has gone into producing the figures commonly cited when detailing the scope of the HIV outbreak in Africa. I would, however, ask sceptics to ponder the beneficiaries of an inflated threat of this disease. The NGOs, university teams and (most) African governments are in accord regarding the magnitude of the AIDS threat. To use the old saying; well – they would be, wouldn’t they? This issue is a magnet for foreign aid and grant money. After all, African despots need to keep their wives in the style they’ve become accustomed to. Not to mention one’s stooges who require regular buying off. NGOs need to run their fleets of SUVs, hold their conferences in five star hotels and generously employ their “support staff”. University professors need grants to carry out their research. I should not forget the UN – regarding that sprawling organisation’s potential conflicts of interest, the mind boggles. These people all have a stake in talking up the HIV/AIDS problem. These are also the people who provide us with data concerning HIV rates in Africa.
I am not a scientist, and I have no specific expertise in this field. I could be omitting important variables that make the scale of the HIV/AIDS problem in Africa that we’re told about more tenable. However, when considering the far lower than popularly believed HIV contraction rates, I smell a rat. What makes me even more suspicious is the fact that the beneficiaries of an overinflated HIV threat in Africa appear to be African governments, NGOs and foreign researchers. Even in rich nations, resources are scarce. We need accurate information to distribute them in optimal fashion. Please set me straight if I am wrong to question, but are we being lied to about the scope of the HIV/AIDS problem in Africa?
I know how many readers and Samizdatistas enjoyed the glorious “Sod off, Swampy!” story from last year. Like the incorrigible news truffle pig he is, Tim Blair found that particular happy tale. This time Tim has prime beef on the menu. Here’s a taste:
Protester Angie Stephenson says it was terrifying.
“The workers, they were standing around cheering and whooping and yelling and making lewd comments so we had to call the police and tell them to get out here straight away,”
A great example of workers’ enterprise in the face of protesting menaces attempting to hinder a perfectly legal activity. I think I will pop down to the shops and buy some expensive fillet steak for dinner to further enjoy the labour of underappreciated abbattoir workers like those mentioned above.
Harry Hutton, the funniest man in the blogosphere, has auteured a short film.
In an odd sort of way, contemporary soft leftists are both obsessed with politics and unpolitical at the same time. That is, their political involvement seems as much about showing what kinds of people they are (caring, concerned etc) as making a difference. The plausibility of a political strategy is less important than being involved.
– Andrew Norton, Research Fellow at the excellent Centre for Independent Studies, editor of Policy magazine and resident at Catallaxy
Brits take note – see what happens when there is no decent succession plan for your monarchy?
[87 year old] King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, who lost $37 million of the kingdom’s money when he gave it to his American court jester, appears to be falling for a Nigerian-type scam.
Oh dear.
Talks were under way “to bring a billion dollars to invest in Tonga to help fund many projects in Tonga” and neighbouring countries, he said.
He would be involved in a telephone link with the investors to set a date to visit Tonga.
“Talks with this bank are for them to use the Reserve Bank of Tonga, to leave their money there and take the funds for the project from the Reserve Bank.
And you thought Prince Charles regularly dressing up like an Imam was a bit embarrassing.
(Via Silent Running)
|
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.
|
