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]
|
Would laws to protect animals from cruelty and/or neglect be legitimate in a free society?
…Good.
It is also insensitive to Catholic feelings, Nazi feelings, Buddhist feelings, Communist feelings, Capitalist feelings, Manchester United Supporter feelings, Surrealist baboon trousers, Scientologist feelings, Creationist feelings, Darwinist feelings…
“Since Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia with the goal of representing all topics from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia is not censored for the benefit of any particular group.”
The whole point of a reference book or reference wiki, is to present information regardless of anyone’s ‘feelings’. And if some Muslims do not like that… tough shit, here is a link to the ‘Mohammed Cartoons‘ for you because to my mind it is not enough to just ignore them, intolerant Islam must be confronted and loudly defied. I could not care less whose ‘feelings’ get hurt by publishing something and thankfully to their credit neither could Wikipedia.
Samizdata is also fairly insensitive to Muslim feelings
In the Daily Telegraph, Simon Heffer gets stuck right into police forces, and especially the constabulary of Kent, for various offences against liberty and common sense. It is a rather populist article, designed to stir the pot, but I think it is a pot worth stirring. I myself on the other end of the world share his disdain for my local police force, which I regard as nothing more or less then the armed enforcers of the Treasury Department.
I certainly have reservations about their ethics, methods, and purpose, and I suspect much worse of them. Given that the head of Australian Federal Police is trying to push for a media blackout of its anti-terrorist activities, a power that could easily be abused, I think I have good reasons to fear the worst from the boys in blue.
How did it come to this? My own guess is that police forces are just reflecting the nature of the governments that supposedly control them. Monkey see, monkey do.
I am fond of telling people who are asking or reading about my views on the rights of employers, employees, etc., that I think that an employer should be allowed to fire an employee if he has taken a dislike to the colour of her eyes. But I think that, courtesy of the ever alert Dave Barry, I may now have found a more vivid way of making the same point:
In her civil case, which is slated to begin in Los Angeles tomorrow, former employee Mary Nelson charges the eccentric Charney, 39, once had a meeting with her wearing only a fragment of clothing called a “c- – k sock,” invited her to masturbate with him, and then fired her when he learned she planned to meet with a lawyer.
Nelson’s lawyer, Keith Fink, said his first witness would be Charney, who’s turned his company into a multimillion-dollar retail giant with 7,000 employees.
Asked in a deposition whether he’d ever referred to women as “sluts” at work, he said, “In private conversations, where such language was generally welcome.”
Asked whether he considered the word “derogatory,” he said, “There are some of us that love sluts … It could be also be an endearing term.”
Asked whether he’d ever used the c-word for female genitalia at work, he said, “Absolutely.”
He also acknowledged traipsing around his company wearing only his American Apparel-made underwear.
“There is no evidence to say that you can’t walk around in your underwear all day anywhere in the United States of America,” he testified.
“Not only does he admit to virtually all of the outlandish allegations in this case, [but] he’s somewhat proud of how he comports himself in the workplace,” Fink said. “That’s what I find so shocking.”
Yes, how appalling. A man, who clearly likes very much being a man, struts about in his own property, behaving like some ancient God of Fertility. Worse, what with his enterprise being a “multi-million dollar retail giant”, I’m guessing that a great many of his employees actually enjoy all this horsing about, and work harder and more alertly than they would if employed by somebody like lawyer Fink. Working for Charney probably wouldn’t suit me, although you never know, maybe I would enjoy it too.
Mr Charney overstates his case when he says he can wear only his cock sock “anywhere in the United States”. The essence of his defence should be his right to wear what he likes in his property, not any right to upset other property owners with their different and duller ideas about what constitutes suitable apparel. But as for everything else, my verdict would be that Mary Nelson and her lawyer, Fink, should leave Mr Charney alone. If Ms. Nelson has discovered that she does not like working for Mr Charney and his multi-million dollar retail giant, she has a simple alternative. Find somewhere else to work and someone else to work for. Clearly this was the arrangement Mr Charney preferred, once he discovered Ms Nelson’s perverted taste for litigation. Ms Nelson should simply acknowledge the wisdom of Mr Charney’s decision, and look elsewhere for employment.
Although I like a lot of its articles, I have to say I got irritated with some of the intellectual flabbiness of Reason magazine a few months ago and my subscription lapsed. I am also trying to save a bit of money and realise that I have rather lot of subscriptions as it is. The magazine spends too much of its time desperately trying to make libertarianism cool and funky by devoting so much stuff to drugs etc, for my liking; but I do check out its website and I enjoy reading its writers such as Brian Doherty. But something of its old hard edge has gone. Maybe I am just becoming an old git (I am sure readers will agree).
It appears one of its former editors, Virginia Postrel, is none too impressed by the judgement of some the magazine’s writers. This has to hurt:
I do fault my friends at Reason, who are much cooler than I’ll ever be and who, scornful of the earnestness that takes politics seriously, apparently didn’t do their homework before embracing Paul as the latest indicator of libertarian cachet. For starters, they might have asked my old boss Bob Poole about Ron Paul; I remember a board member complaining about Paul’s newsletters back in the early ’90s. Besides, people as cosmopolitan as Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch should be able to detect something awry in Paul’s populist appeals. (Note that by “cosmopolitan” I do not mean “Jewish.” I mean cosmopolitan.) I suspect they did but decided it was more useful to spin things their way than to take Paul’s record and ideas seriously. As for Andrew Sullivan, his political infatuations are not his strong point as a commentator.
The line right at the end about Sullivan is a devastating put-down for being so polite.
There is an outstanding article on the interesting new blog The Line is Here called I am no longer a child and I strongly commend it to everyone. It captures the essence of the New Totalitarianism in a very different way to my polemical approach to the subject and is perhaps all the more powerful for it.
I have quite liked the music of Joe Jackson but I did not realise he had such sound views on things like personal liberty. Check out his site.
Imagine telling somebody twenty years ago that by 2007, it would be illegal to smoke in a pub or bus shelter or your own vehicle or that there would be £80 fines for dropping cigarette butts, or that the words “tequila slammer” would be illegal or the government would mandate what angle a drinker’s head in an advertisement may be tipped at, or that it would be illegal to criticise religions or homosexuality, or rewire your own house, or that having sex after a few drinks would be classed as rape or that the State would be confiscating children for being overweight. Imagine telling them the government would be contemplating ration cards for fuel and even foods, that every citizen would be required to carry an ID card filled with private information which could be withdrawn at the state’s whim. They’d have thought you a paranoid loon.
– Samizdata commenter Ian B. We do not have to imagine these things any more, alas. The only problem with his quote is that he omitted to mention assault on jury trials, Habeas Corpus, double-jeopardy…
Instapundit has linked to this story, but I am not yet wholly convinced. I am happy to add to the general blog-yell that may or may not now be going up everywhere in the non-pro-Islamic blogosphere, but suspect – although I could be entirely wrong in my suspicion – that this may turn out to be a bit of an exaggeration:
I am currently out of the Country and on my return home to England I am going to be arrested by British detectives on suspicion of Stirring up Racial Hatred by displaying written material” contrary to sections 18(1) and 27(3) of the Public Order Act 1986.
This charge if found guilty carries a lengthy prison sentence, more than what most paedophiles and rapists receive, …
At the risk of being pedantic, what precisely happened? Did Lionheart get a letter? If so, what, precisely, did it say? To be even more pedantic, the phrase “This charge if found guilty” It does not fill me with confidence. Nor does it that, on what is obviously such an important matter, Lionheart has allowed a pair of inverted commas to go awol. But maybe that is to read too much into what is merely some stressed-out grammar.
I suspect that, if any ruckus does now occur, there will in due course be an announcement to the effect that Mr Lionheart has entirely misunderstood the situation and has nothing to fear, free speech is sacred, blah blah. If that does happen, it may then be hard to know how much this official clarification will be a true clarification of what had, truly, been the attitude of the authorities, and how much it will be a tactical retreat in the face of an Instalaunch, and of any blogosphere and mainstream media fuss that follows from it. But whatever has been and turns out to be the true story here, I would now like to know a bit more.
Lionheart’s central claim, albeit floridly expressed, is one I have come around agreeing with, having started out (on 9/12) believing the opposite. The enemy is not “Islamic extremism”. The enemy is Islam. Although please note that this says nothing about the manner in which this enemy should be responded to. I daresay I might disagree somewhat with Lionheart’s ideas about that.
But even if I disagreed with Lionheart about everything, I still agree with Instapundit’s attitude:
I don’t know much about the blogger, but I don’t need to – people shouldn’t be arrested merely for blogging things that the powers-that-be don’t like.
If Lionheart’s claim that he faces arrest just for blogging his mind are correct, then of course it is everything-and-the-kitchen-sink time. Let battle be joined. But for now, I would like just a little more reconnaissance.
Even more predictable than the post-Thanksgiving appearance of shopping-mall Santas is the inability of pundits at this time of year to say or to write “commercialism” without prefixing to it the word “crass” – as we encounter in your pages today in Tom Krattenmaker’s “The real meaning of Christmas.”
I challenge this notion. Commerce is peaceful. It involves sellers working hard and taking risks to bring to market goods and services that consumers want to buy. No one forces anyone to do anything; all is voluntary.
What truly is crass is politics – that sorry spectacle of power-seeking ego-maniacs who, when not pronouncing platitudes, are promising to help group A by picking the pockets of group B. While commerce is honest, politics is duplicitous. While commerce is peaceful, politics inevitably pits citizen against citizen. Far more enlightened and ethical behavior is on display during any one day in a shopping mall than the most intrepid observer will find in a century on Pennsylvania Avenue.
– A letter from Donald J. Boudreaux to USA Today. Amit Varma liked it too.
Is it possible to be both a nationalist and a libertarian?
Amazon has just been ordered by the French state to stop delivering books for free, and in general to refrain from charging too little for books. This is just wrong, says Instapundit.
With questions like this, I come over all Paul Coulam. I start not with what might or might not seem nice, but with libertarian dogma.
Amazon owns some books. They should be allowed sell them to you for any price they like, and subject to any conditions they like. They should be allowed to offer to deliver them any way they like, for any price they like. And if you are interested, you should be allowed to say … yes! Or: no. It really should be that simple. If you have to die your hair blue before they will sell books to you, well that would be a strange business model to follow, but: the books belong to them and they should be allowed to part with them, or not, on any basis they like.
However, the principle that if you own something you should be allowed to sell it on any basis you like would also allow certain other arrangements to pertain. → Continue reading: The state should not control prices but property owners should be allowed to control their own prices any way they like
|
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.
|
