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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When you read this kind of thing in a newspaper, it’s bad. But when you read it at cricinfo …:
The riots and looting in Birmingham were copycat incidents following events in London over the previous days. The vandalism was concentrated around the city centre, with masked young men and women going on a rampage from early evening, looting shops and destroying property.
They started by snatching mobile phones and handbags from pedestrians, followed by kicking, punching, breaking windows of shopping centres, banks, pubs, restaurants, forcing people to shut down these establishments. Groups of two or three suddenly grew larger and created an atmosphere of panic and fear. Through the evening and night riot police were on the main streets, armoured police vehicles and other cars scanned the roads, and a helicoper hovered overhead.
The headline above this says: “Test likely to begin despite riots”.
One of the more depressing things about these riots is the way that the only thing that the Police can think of to say to us non-looters and non-arsonists is: “Don’t join in” and “Let us handle it”. If the bad guys start to torch your house, let them get on with it. If they attack your next door neighbour, don’t join in on his side. Run away. Let the barbarians occupy and trash whatever territory they pick on and steal or destroy whatever property they want to.
There was a fascinating impromptu TV interview with some young citizens of Clapham last night, not “experts”, just regular citizens, one of whom stated the opposite policy. Law abiding persons should get out of their houses, he said, en masse, and be ready to defend them.
The trouble with “letting the Police do their job” is that in the precise spot in which you happen to live, or used to live, their job probably won’t start, if it ever does start, for about a week. In the meantime, letting the Police do their job means letting the damn looters and arsonists do their job, without anyone laying a finger on them, laying a finger on them being illegal. This is a doomed policy. If most people are compelled by law to be only neutral bystanders in a war between themselves and barbarism, barbarism wins. The right to, at the very least, forceful self defence must now be insisted upon. The Police, as we advocates of the don’t-disarm-the-victims-of-crime policy have been pointing out for decades, can’t be everywhere. They cannot instantaneously attend every crime, and magically prevent it. Only the potential or actual victims of crime can sometimes immediately prevent or immediately punish crime, provided only that they are not forbidden to.
Says Instapundit:
Unlike L.A., there are no Korean shopkeepers with AR-15s to help contain the looting.
Precisely.
The best thing about these riots is that they have distilled and aggregated the folly of the “let the Police see to it” policy into a large and combined event, and they have done it right next door to where our political class lives. These riots are not confined to Birmingham, or some such second-tier city. They are happening in the backyard of our rulers, even as they hurry back home from Tuscany.
For the last few decades the don’t-get-involved, let-Them-handle-it policy has applied only to more isolated crimes, or to riots only way beyond our capital city, which has meant that its doomed nature has impacted only upon those individuals or local populations attacked by criminals, not on the nation as a whole as perceived and lived in by those ruling it. Now our rulers can see this policy in vividly dramatic “action” (i.e. inaction), live on TV, and near enough to where they live for them to be scared, along with everyone else. And the rest of us will see them turning into the kind of vengeful right wing monsters they despise, as soon as their own houses are attacked. Which they well might be.
I recall reading about a yob who stole something from a street stall in Nigeria, many years ago. He was promptly set upon by a mob, of stallholders and their customers, and beaten up. Are you civilised? It depends which side your mobs are on. All our mobs, except the little mobs that are the Police, are anti-civilisation.
I own a cricket bat, inherited from my late Uncle Guy (whom I wrote about towards the end of this ancient blog posting), with “G Micklethwait” written on it. I hope I don’t find myself thinking about using it during the next few days, but I have already checked where it is.
Reading about the arrest of what appears to have been an extremist planning an attack on Ft Hood, Texas, I was struck by the contrast with the Oslo attack last weekend.
Private First Class Naser Jason Abdo, was arrested Wednesday after making a purchase at Guns Galore in Killeen, Texas, the same ammunition store where Maj. Nidal Hasan purchased the weapons he allegedly used to gun down 13 people and wound 32 others on Nov. 5, 2009.
The point being that a legal gun shop owner is more likely to call the police than a black market arms supplier would. Now if we could only get all the gun rights people in America to realise the advantages of legal outlets for drugs as well…
I never had a mammogram and never hope to get one, and far from dreading mastectomy, the subject makes me positively canty: I could get a better fit in a shoulder holster.
– Florence King, “The New Hypochondriacs”.
What a pity there is no culture of personal defence and widespread concealed carry in Norway as it would have been nice to see one of the victims shoot back at the bastard.
– A sentiment much echoed in various armed self-defence forums regarding the recent atrocity in Norway.
Violence must be replied to with violence. The only time I would suggest turning the other cheek is when firing off the left shoulder with a rifle after taking cover in a doorway.
– Perry de Havilland commenting here
Well, call Ghost Busters if you like but for heaven’s sake do not call the Plod.
When a gang of travellers trespassed on her land and allegedly threatened to cut her throat with a chainsaw, Tracy St Clair Pearce dialled 999, expecting protection and reassurance from the police.
But while they took a statement and visited the nearby traveller camp, officers came back and confiscated her shotgun, saying it was a “sensible precaution”.
Well Tracy got quite a life lesson, eh? Where on earth did she get notion the State gives a damn about her right to self defence from some predatory ‘Traveller’ thugs?
The rule is simple… are you a home owner? Never. Ever. Call. The. Police.
They are not there to protect you. Just file this under ‘the State is not your friend’…
Praveen Swami, diplomatic editor of the Daily Telegraph, has a good piece – although I might quibble on one or two points – concerning the problem of Somali piracy, about which I have written several times here at Samizdata. I am not going to add further comment to what I have already said, but I was impressed by this article and a longish comment attached to it by a person with the signature of “IgonikonJack”. It is pretty good. And another, by “itzman”, refers to the issue of “letters of marque”.
A related point is that I have been reading Wired for War, by PW Singer, and it has fascinating things to say about some remarkable new technologies as apply not just in areas such as robotics and pilotless aircraft – those “drones” – also in the innovations now under way in the nautical world. They will surely play a part in any move to suppress piracy, but as Singer points out, the bad guys can increasingly get their hands on technology as well, and often by entirely legitimate means. This is all the more reason why libertarians, who are sometimes at the cutting edge of thinking about alternatives to government-imposed laws, as in the case of legal writer Bruce Benson, should get involved in how to address issues such as piracy.
In the Daily Telegraph article I link to, is the fact that, at the time of writing, more than 1,000 people are being held hostage by Somali pirates. If the same amount of people had been taken hostage on civil airliners, say, I think the major powers of the world might have adopted a more robust view by now.
I am sure most of our readers will get a kick out of this assuming they have not already heard about it.
A former beauty queen blew away a thief who broke into her home in Florida. Think of it as evolution in action…
The current eruptions of civil unrest and protest across North Africa and the Middle East – no wonder oil prices are surging – has also thrown into unflattering relief the issue of Western arms sales to some regimes, such as that of Libya. And no doubt the argument will be made that, for example in the case of the recent, unlamented Blair/Brown governments in the UK, the administration put export earnings (oil, arms contracts) above such niceties as basic morality or even, arguably, long-term national security.
But here is a thing: according to Shariah law, it is prohibited for Muslims to invest in things such as the arms trade. Making weapons of war is put on the same banned list as pork, gambling, usury and pornography (sounds like all the really good things, Ed). So let me get this straight: some of the most fanatically Muslim regimes on the planet, such as Saudi Arabia, insist on sweeping prohibitions on making arms, but are more than keen to spend all that oil wealth on buying Typhoon fighters or whatever. This is surely an example of the contortions that Islamic law imposes on people. Another case being usury, as I have noted before.
Of course, all belief systems, secular and “religious” variety, come up against the issue of awkward realities and human hypocrisy. But when you next read a story bashing Western arms manufacturers for shipping instruments of death to the Middle East, perhaps it would be well to remember that the locals are apparently banned from making these instruments, but some of them are quite happy to reach for the wallet and buy them.
And lest you think this is just an issue for Islam, it is arguable that even those investors who put money into “ethical” funds that avoid arms trades would do well to reflect on where they think governments buy weapons for even strict self defence? I make this point in case anyone claims I am singling out Islam in general; I mention it in this case since obviously, much of the current buying of weapons is being driven by the Middle East.
It appears that the shipping insurance industry, taking increasing hits from the sheer volume of kidnappings by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean, has decided to come up with some new responses to this. Market forces in action.
Watching a Channel 4 programme last night about a recent capture of a vessel and subsequent shootings, a figure came out that about 780 people hostages are still being held captive by these vermin. Kerist.
Here is a previous posting on the issue by Perry back in 2009. Here is another comment on this issue by yours truly, responding to a particularly silly claim.
Brian Micklethwait has also written on this issue over at his blog.
Predictably in the wake of the shooting of a US politician and her surrounding admirers by an incoherent leftist (but I repeat myself), the journalistic profession continues to show just how completely they do not understand the subject they write about.
It is too painful for a nation traumatised by Tucson to reflect how these virtues have been betrayed once again by the insidious gun culture of America; by the pathetic weakness of laws which allow criminals and madmen to get their hands on real weapons of mass destruction that can fire hundreds of bullets in a minute; by the gun lobby’s intimidation of politicians in vulnerable seats; by the greed of the gunmakers who nowadays prefer to manufacture weapons more suitable for mass murder than for individual defence.
Yet far from gunmakers (who are a trivial political force) driving this debate, never was there a more truly ‘grass roots’ movement in the USA than the one which supports the right to keep and bear arms. Moreover ‘individual defence’ is only one of the reasons the Second Amendment exists… the primary reason for this piece of constitutional artifice is to keep the population armed as a counterweight not to criminals, well private sector criminals that is, but to the state itself.
But to expect a mainstream journalist writing for a British newspaper declaiming about US affairs to understand that… well I suppose that is like expecting a rodent to suddenly start quoting Shakespeare. It just ain’t going to happen. People like journalist Harold Evans have hardly blinked as personal liberties have been remorselessly eroded across the western world and when they call for yet more state controls, their opinions should be judged accordingly.
Reflecting on the Wikileaks issue – see Perry’s post on Samizdata on Saturday – it occurs to me that one group of folk who must be a bit miffed by the leaks are parts of the anti-war side, especially those of a conspiracy theory cast of mind. For example, where is the leaked memo that “proves” there was some evil Jewish/neo-con/international banker/armsdealer/insert villain of choice conspiracy to blow up the WTC and then blame it on bin Laden? And I note that one of the leaked cables suggests that the Saudis are very alarmed by the geo-political ambitions of Iran, and want the West to contain it. Well, that surely fits with what a lot of those supposedly bloodthirsty neocons around George W Bush had been saying. And so on.
The leaks have done damage, no doubt about it, and unlike Perry, I am not so sangine about the overall impact of Wikileaks as far as rolling back the state is concerned. This is one of those things I find hard to be able to prove conclusively one way or the other; generally speaking, the more openness, the better, and the fewer hiding places for governments, the better. I also think, however, that leaks of secrets that may harm self defence efforts of genuinely liberal states against terrorist groups, if they occur, are enough to send such leakers to jail on the grounds of being reckless in offering, however unintentionally, aid to such groups.
But it is, nonetheless interesting that none of the dottier conspiracies swirling around 9/11 have yet to appear. The reason is that such conspiracy theories are bunk.
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