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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The French and German ministers recently tasked with boosting bilateral cooperation have already agreed on one important point – the need for summer crash courses to learn each other’s language. French European Affairs Minister Noelle Lenoir and her German counterpart Hans-Martin Bury said each would spend part of their holidays in the other’s country sweating over grammar rules and vocabulary lists.
They met to prepare an October conference bringing together the heads of France’s 22 regions and Germany’s 16 federal states to discuss boosting cooperation in education, culture, economic development and environmental issues. Lenoir told journalists in French after talks with Bury:
German must gradually become almost as widely spoken and as easily spoken as English is today.
Heh.
I suppose that, one way or another, this will all get smoothed out in the long run but, nonetheless, we can enjoy it while it lasts:
Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor, called off his summer holiday to Italy yesterday, as the worsening row between the countries began to unravel years of carefully orchestrated co-operation at the heart of Europe.
More and faster, please.
We’re all familiar with the popular cartoon caricature of Americans as gun-crazy cowboys who would shoot you as soon as look at you and peaceful, sophisticated, post-history Europeans who only need their directives to keep them safe from harm. In fact, I have lost count of the number of sneering British lefty journalists who prefix every reference to Americans with the words ‘gun-toting’ as a means of driving home the impression that they are dangerous, violent, atavistic non-communautaire people.
True? Well, probably not:
“Contrary to the common assumption that Europeans are virtually unarmed, an estimated 84 million firearms are legally held in the 15 member states of the EU. Of these, 80 per cent – 67 million guns – are in civilian hands,”
Good gracious! And to think that Tony Blair wants political union with these gun-loving maniacs!
Finland, with its strong hunting tradition, has the most legally registered guns in the EU at 39 per 100 people, the UK has 10 – one third of the German and French figures – and the Netherlands has two. Gun laws are tightest in the UK, the Netherlands and Poland, while France has more legal handguns than the Czech Republic, Denmark, Poland, England, Wales and Scotland combined.
Just one quibble: there are no legally held handguns in the UK at all so maybe France is not quite as awash with hand cannons as the article would suggest. Nonetheless it is clear that most Europeans have not, in fact, been gripped by the same anti-gun hysteria that has swept over Britain.
On this day, nearly two hundred years ago, the artillery, cavalry and red coated infantry of Britain, along with their Dutch and Prussian allies, finally put an end to the tyrannical rule of Napoleon Bonaparte on the Belgian wheat fields of Waterloo, near Brussels. It was the Duke of Wellington’s greatest triumph.
Given that this blog is of course, such a great fan of the French political class (heh), I trust no readers of this publication would be so vulgar and unsophisticated to point out this salient historical anniversary to their friends and colleagues today.
I just thought you would like to have this titbit of historical information, gentle reader.
“Up Guards, and at ’em!”
– Wellington, June 18th 1815
As a break from the usual tread-mill of Libertarian Principles, here is a story that best reflects the ‘quagmire’ Britain got itself into by having anything to do with the EU and the countries using its institutions to their advantage. Despite the ravenous inclusiveness of the European Union, the one thing there is no room left for is common sense.
The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg ruled that Italian Parma ham must be packed and sliced in Parma itself to be marketed with its name of origin. The Asda supermarket chain has lost its legal battle to carry on selling Italian Parma ham, because it is packed and sliced in Britain.
Asda’s Parma ham comes from Parma, but it is sliced and packaged near Chippenham in Wiltshire. Its delicatessen Parma ham also comes from Parma – but is sliced in its stores, in front of the customer. European judges have ruled that this is not enough under EU law to justify using the name.
Maintaining the quality and reputation of Parma ham justifies the rule that the product must be sliced and packaged in the region of production.
According to The Daily Telegraph Asda claimed the Italian law was not part of EU law and could not be applied in the UK, but ham from Parma was registered under a 1992 EU rule protecting the use of geographical names on some products. The battle went to London’s High Court, which passed the matter to the Luxembourg judges for a ruling on the EU’s Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) law.
The Parma ham producers’ association, which owns the trademark Prosciutto di Parma, has been seeking an injunction against Asda since 1997. Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma won the battle despite judge’s recommendation to overturn the relevant European regulation and the advice the European Court of Justice received by one of its own members to invalidate the European Union rule.
As Asda representative said last year:
No one doubts that Scotch beef remains Scottish if sliced in Southampton; Jersey potatoes are still Jerseys when boiled in Blackpool; and cheddar cheese is still cheddar if grated in Gretna.
In most cases the court follows such advice, for example, the European court’s advocate general delivered a similar opinion in a case brought against a company that grates the hard Italian cheese Grana Padana in France.
Not this time though. When you next eat your Parma, you can rejoice in the knowledge that it has been subjected to the traditionally tough quality control by its Italian producer. I suppose there is a first for everything…
Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated by an eco-terrorist, ending what was a truly interesting period of business-not-as-usual in the Netherlands.
Fortuyn was a fascinating man, easy to misunderstand. Both David Carr and I had initially mistaken him as just a Dutch version of French fascist Jean-Marie le Pen, but in fact nothing could have been further from the truth. To have even labelled him as ‘right wing’ was profoundly uninformative and in many ways down right misleading, revealing more about the commentator doing so that anything about Fortuyn.
One year on and sadly the people who reaped the ‘benefit’ of Pim Fortuyn death have proved to be the same grey men and women of the orthodox Dutch left and right who have enervated that once dynamic nation, hanging on to an electoral party list system that amounts to the political equivalent of Henry Ford’s ‘choose any colour, as long as it is black’.
The weed has been pulled out by the roots and nothing disturbs the monoculture of blood red poppies adorning that graveyard which is the political status quo.
The European Central Bank has said that joining the Euro would mean the end of the free NHS, reports The Times (we do not link to the Times). Apparently the April edition monthly report of the ECB said that:
Governments should distinguish between “essential, privately non-insurable and non-affordable services”, such as emergency treatment, and those where “private financing might be more efficient”.
In truth, the actual ECB report [pdf file] does not say anything quite so bluntly. The actual report is full of careful conditionals and non-assertions: “governments may have to rise contribution rates”, such co-payments could increase efficiency”, “pre-financing [of geriatric care] has been proposed” and “It has been argued that setting of budget caps…can improve overall performance”. (page 45) → Continue reading: “Euro means end of NHS”
As a firm believer in judicial independence, I consider it to be a generally good thing when Courts refuse to be swayed by the capricious impulses of public sentiment. Having said that, I wonder if the Dutch judiciary are going to have cause to regret the perceived leniency they have shown towards the assassin of Pim Fortuyn:
Admirers of the assassinated Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn struggled to contain their fury yesterday when his self-confessed killer got off “lightly” with an 18-year prison term.
The killing and its overtly ideological nature had persuaded many that the only sentence the judges would dare pass was life.
Regardless of the ‘ideological nature’, I think a life sentence is wholly appropriate in cases of pre-meditated murder such as this.
Dutch convicts tend to serve only two-thirds of their sentence, and the three judges in Amsterdam made it clear that they believed he should be given a chance to reintegrate in society.
Which means that the perpetrator will actually serve about 10 or 11 years.
Comparing Fortuyn’s rise to that of Adolf Hitler, he said he had felt compelled to eliminate him as a favour to the Muslim minority and other vulnerable sections of society.
As with most ‘Hitler’ comparisons, this one is way over the top. The late Mr.Fortuyn may have had some rather strident views on immigration but nothing I have read about the man suggests that he was any kind of ‘blut und boden’ ethnic nationalist.
“This is unbelievable,” Henk Sonneveld, a member of one of Fortuyn’s political vehicles, Leefbaar Rotterdam, told the Guardian.
“We are angry and mad with this. Eighteen years is not enough. In nine or 10 years’ time this guy could be walking the streets. It should have been life. Fortuyn was killed for his ideas – think about that.”
Yes, I have thought about it and my conclusion is that the ghost of Pim Fortuyn is going to be rattling its chains around Holland for a long time to come.
One of the oddities of being a samizdatista is that comments are often attached to things you wrote weeks or even months ago, in a way that no one else is ever likely to see. Usually such comments are of no great note, but two yesterday, attached to a posting on a completely different subject, definitely got my attention. First, there was this, from Victoria Miller:
DEMOCRATIZING BEGAN IN IRAQ
coalition troops set heavy weapons
thousands of marine soldiers,
airplanes, tanks, uniformed lapdogs and bulldogs
open and secret machines of modernized war industry
general Shurk in Pentagon says;
we bring democracy.
meanwhile they systematically bombed
showed fake pictures, Ghurka-media served
massacred civil people of Basra, Baghdad, Mosul
like Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin
on the blood of children, they declared victory
at least, the thieves celebreting everywhere
world witnessed similarly scenes under WW II,
americans saving the plunderers
the Jews, steal wealth of whole Continent
and escaped to Jew York, Sweden, London, Australia
like that, looting continues all over Iraq
general Shurk in Pentagon says;
democratizing continues
And then there was this, from Martin Brandberger:
“I AM AN AMERICAN NOW!”
→ Continue reading: Poetry
Megan McArdle (linked to by Instpundit) probably speaks for many on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially in the USA, when she asks: what is Chirac up to? She doesn’t know. All he seems to be achieving is to antagonise the USA, to no apparent purpose.
She’s right about what he’s doing. But maybe the answer is that he is doing this deliberately, for local reasons.
It was said after 9/11 that you couldn’t understand Al-Qaeda’s thinking if you thought only about what they were trying to do to the USA. You had to look at their local picture. What if they were really trying to impress fellow Muslims, and to increase their power not so much in the world as a whole but within the Muslim world?
I believe that something similar applies now to France. France’s main concern now is to get the sort of Europe it wants, namely a centralised European state, with France playing a very prominent part. → Continue reading: What France is playing at – a conjecture from and about L’Europe
You can barely take a casual stroll through cyberspace these days without tripping over some hot-off-the-press manifestation of blistering European anti-Americanism. Such a stark contrast to all the pious one-world anti-xenophobia cant that Brussels has spent that last decade or so assiduously peddling.
Since ‘xenophobia’ is regarded as a crime under the proposed European Criminal Code, it does make me wonder how they’re going to enforce it against the gangs of 35 year-old ‘students’ burning flags and screaming ‘Death to America’ on the streets of Berlin and Paris. I suppose the answer is, they’re not.
Which leaves the Americans to do something about it themselves. That is, if they are so inclined. While B-52s are still swooping over Baghdad, it is unlikely to be a top priority but if, at some point in the future, George Bush et al are minded to huddle in the War Room and cook up some delicious helping of Creme du Revenge, my advice would be, don’t bother:
Europe’s population could fall by up to 40 per cent by the end of the century because of declining birth rates and the tendency for women to have babies later in life, researchers have found.
For the first time in human history, the population has begun to experience what demographers call “negative momentum”, when a shrinking population goes into a spiral of decline. Wolfgang Lutz of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, says that Europe experienced a “flip” from positive to negative momentum in 2000 because fewer babies were being born to younger mothers
→ Continue reading: Just a song at twilight
Polish Ambassador Maciej Kozlowski said yesterday that Europe should remember what America has done in the last 80 years, twice saving Europe from calamity. He brushed aside French President Jacques Chirac’s harsh criticism of those European countries which support the war, insisting that France and Germany are misreading the political situation.
In a mostly symbolic move that exemplifies the pro-American stance that Poland has taken, the Polish army sent some 200 troops including special commando forces, navy, and chemical warfare experts to buttress the primarily American and British forces. The country’s small contingent of special forces, which also operated in Afghanistan, is reportedly now in action in Iraq.
Declaring that each country has deeply different historical remembrances, Kozlowski, who came to Jerusalem without a gas mask, said that Poland remembers America opposing communist and other brutal dictatorships.
As such, we accepted as inevitable the war with Saddam, who by everybody’s account is a brutal dictator.
Refreshingly straightforward.
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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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