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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then surely accreditation must run it a very close second. There may well be pundits and scribblers who do not experience the frisson of pride when their work is quoted in other media but, if so, then I have never met them.
Speaking for myself, I simply love it when other people link to my articles or quote from them. Nor is my satisfaction diminished by even the smallest degree who link to my articles as evidence that I am mad, bad and dangerous to know. It’s the recognition, stupid. Even if my attributors despise every single sentiment I ever express, at least they consider me significant enough to be worth drawing to the attention of others.
However, some people take quite the contrary view. In this case, a certain Mr. Greg Truscott of the South London Press.
It seems that Mr.Truscott has been filing reports about the nasty violent crimes which occur with disturbing regularity in and around South London and which are published on-line at the South London Press website (above). → Continue reading: “Quote me and I’ll sue”
I used to be a singer in a rock and roll band.
Well, okay, maybe not, but I was a lead guitarist in a punk rock band. I even had my Fender copy tuned so I could play the major rock chords with a single sliding finger, just like those anarcho-punk legends, Crass.
If only our band had possessed some luck, a good manager, a driving licence between us, some money, a van, and a small pet monkey named Brian, we might have made it big. Especially if the lead guitarist had actually possessed any talent.
But, alas, this punk dream faded, as it did for a million others, and my brush with anarchy submerged itself for another twenty years. However, much to my surprise it resurfaced again last year, a little rusty but largely unscathed, when it experienced a depth charge blast from Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s mental mind bomb, Democracy: The God That Failed.
There are few in the world who dare promote the dissolution of all forms of government, especially in the hostile spitting face of a billion state-supporting rent seekers. And of those few brave men, only a tiny handful, mostly Austro-libertarians, possess the requisite economic theory, moral strength, and political knowledge to really frighten all of those state-loving horses. Foremost amongst them is Professor Hoppe, a man in the proper Austrian tradition of being a German speaker by birth, though also a man at odds with many inside proper libertarian circles, as opposed to those Christmas-voting leftist libertarian turkeys who believe the state is the ultimate guarantor of individual rights. Which makes about as much sense as taxman with genuine friends. → Continue reading: Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Defying Leviathan
For those who missed it, this morning, there was a fascinating article in the Daily Telegraph about the increasing failure of the British state to perform its most basic activity, that of providing personal security to its tax-paying citizens. It seems more and more people are simply withdrawing any hope they may have once held in the British police and are taking their own personal security matters directly into their own hands, with impressive crime reduction results to boot, through the creation and adoption of private police forces.
It seems the Individualist Revolution really is creeping up on us, unawares, as street by street, in Britain, the enfeebled state withers away and people take an ever-increasing amount of private control over their own private lives.
This is not what the state intended. But it is what is happening. Long may this withering process continue.
Like many people, I recently thoroughly enjoyed that rather silly movie romp, Pirates of the Caribbean, full of English toffs in redcoats, ghostly pirates with bad teeth, not to mention luscious wenches relying on the dubious chivalry and charm of Johnny Depp. However, lest we think piracy belongs to the era of men in wigs with parrots on their shoulders, I have news to report.
Seaborne piracy is rising fast in many parts of the world. It is particularly virulent in parts of Southeast Asia, for example in and around the coastlands of the vast stretch of islands making up Indonesia. Today’s Caribbean and the Indian Ocean are also dangerous. A while back, while I was spending a wonderful day ogling at unattainably expensive sailing yachts at the London International Boatshow, I grabbed hold of a book warning amateur sailors about the perils of being held to ransom by pirates in oceans all over the world. At the very least, you would be nuts to embark on a long passage without carrying at least two workeable firearms.
But as the report I link to makes clear, there is increasingly an ideological slant to modern piracy. In Indonesia, it appears that Islamic militants, like terrorists the world over, are mixing their religious fervour with the juicy temptations of crime.
I am frankly surprised that there has not been more written on how easy it would be for a terrorist group to get hold of even a small sized motor boat, fill it chockfull of explosives, sail it up the Thames, the Rhine or any other major river you can think of, and blow it up. As an aside, I continue to be amazed at how relatively easy it is to sail into a marina without necessarily having to immediately declare any ID. On a recent trip to France by yacht I never once was required to show so much as a passport.
If you haven’t dropped in on Clayton Cramer lately, do so. He has links to more self defense stories per day than I have typically seen in a full year.
Over at One Hand Clapping you can read about a new mobile phone technology that will simply knock you dead.
Iraqis are not just depending on government to protect their new liberty. According to this report from the Coalition Provisional Authority, they are armed and dangerous… to terrorists:
Elsewhere in Baghdad, individuals inside a white Opel fired small arms at ICDC personnel at the Al-Amil gas station. The Civil Defense Corps soldiers returned fire, and Iraqi customers waiting for fuel also fired at the Opel. The assailants broke contact, and a search of the area met with negative results.
Is it just me or does this paragraph sound like something out of an L Neil Smith novel?
Tony Martin was clearly a trailblazer:
A proposal to allow homeowners to use “any means” to defend their homes, has topped a BBC poll on the bill people would most like to see become law.
BBC Radio 4’s Today programme asked listeners to vote on suggested Private Members’ Bills, with the first choice taking 37% of the votes.
Norfolk farmer Tony Martin, whose fatal shooting of a burglar in 1999 sparked a national debate, welcomed the result.
As well he might. For him this is a vindication. For others, though, this is an embarrassment, not least of all for the Conservative MP who was supposed to be Tony Martin’s champion:
Tony Martin’s MP, Conservative Henry Bellingham said the idea went too far by suggesting homeowners should use “any means” to protect their property.
For politicians this potato is just too hot to touch. The mere mention of rights to self-defence is enough to have them scampering away whelping like whipped curs. Nor do I expect that this synthetic exercise is going to make so much as a dent in the established view that defending oneself from barbarity is morally more reprehensible than the barbarity itself:
More than 26,000 votes were registered by listeners taking part in the poll and the winning bill will now be presented to the House of Commons by Stephen Pound MP.
He will need to persuade the 20 MPs who have been chosen to put forward Private Members Bills to take up the poll winner’s suggestion.
He will have more chance trying to persuade Osama Bin Laden to book his daughters in for pole-dancing lessons. Me being cynical? No, not at all. Just hear what the same Stephen Pound has to say about the whole thing in the Guardian:
Stephen Pound, Labour MP for Ealing North, who was one of the programme’s judges, expressed surprise at the high vote for such a controversial plan among listeners to such a programme.
“My enthusiasm for direct democracy is slightly dampened,” the MP told Today. “This is a difficult result. I can’t remember who it was who said ‘The people have spoken – the bastards’.”
Hmm, colour me skeptical but I have a hunch that his heart is not really going to be behind this campaign. These people are always agitating for ‘more democracy’ until it jumps up and slaps them in the face. Democracy is only supposed to be for the compliant: no ‘bastards’ allowed.
Mr Pound, however, is one of the more sanguine respondents. Elsewhere there is enough sqwauking and clucking to drown out a poultry market. The Guardian is already denouncing the result as a fix:
The BBC was warned yesterday that it may have fallen victim to a mass lobbying campaign after a controversial plan for a “Tony Martin” law topped a Today programme poll yesterday.
Suspicions were raised when thousands of listeners voted for the mock parliamentary bill which would allow homeowners to use “any means” to defend their homes from intruders. Such a law would have protected Mr Martin, who was jailed for the manslaughter of a teenage burglar, Fred Barras, in 1999.
And from the BBC article, linked above, a dire warning of what such mad and irresponsible ideas would lead to:
But leading criminal barrister John Cooper warned that the idea was dangerously flawed.
He said: “The law as it stands at the moment, despite its critics, is functioning. If you are in your house and you are attacked by someone or threatened by someone, you can use proportionate force.
“We do not live in the wild west. This legislation that is proposed effectively may well turn us into that.”
Thus proving that it is possible to be wrong on more than one level. For a start the ‘wild west’ was nowhere near as wild as legend would have it. But I’m quibbling here because I sort of know what he is driving at. He thinks RKBA and a right to self-defence would result in a desolate landscape riven with feuds, lynchings and random acts of carnage. He is still wrong though because that is exactly the type of scenario we are heading for now. The virtually unprotected citizen is easy meat for predatory.
Having assumed a monopoly of the crime-control business, the British state has found it cannot actually do that job and, increasingly, is disinclined to even try. The only thing they can maintain is the pretence by landing like a ton of bricks on any citizen who dares to be more than a docile farm-animal.
The result of the BBC poll gives lie to the whole facade. People are losing faith in the ability (and even willingness) of the state to come to their aid in time of crisis. As the police spend more of their time collecting taxes and scoring brownie points with their political masters, this disquiet will only grow.
[This article has been cross-posted to White Rose.]
By the time I finish concocting this post David Carr will probably have posted on the subject already, because it’s right up his alley, if he’ll pardon the expression. No, nothing from him yet and this posting is now done, so here goes. (UPDATE: something from David after all – see above – and HE got the Instapundit link. It’s a tough blogosphere.)
Basically, what it was was that the BBC, in the form of the Today Programme, decided to do a stunt stroke exercise in participatory democracy, and they arranged that listeners could vote for whatever law they wanted to vote for, and the winning law would then be presented to Parliament by a pre-appointed MP who, believing as he does in democracy and all that, was happy to commit himself to whatever law got the most vox from the populus.
The idea was that a law would duly be voted for about saving an Endangered Species or banning a Officially Disapproved-of food or pleasure or past-time. That would-be law would actually be presented to Parliament. It would not be enacted. But another little gob of nannyism would duly have been proclaimed as desirable.
However, the plan went wrong. The particular bit of the populus that got most organised and did the most voting was the bit that thinks that Tony Martin was right to shoot at those thieving bastards who attacked him in his rural farm, and that if one was killed and the other wounded, that should have been their problem for being thieving bastards, and not Tony Martin’s for defending himself and his property. So a new law was crafted along the lines of people being allowed to use any means they like to defend their property. It got the most votes. So now, the Independent reports, the MP who promised to present this to Parliament is going to have to do just that. He is not a happy MP:
Mr Pound’s reaction was provoked by the news that the winner of Today’s “Listeners’ Law” poll was a plan to allow homeowners “to use any means to defend their home from intruders” – a prospect that could see householders free to kill burglars, without question.
“The people have spoken,” the Labour MP replied to the programme, “… the bastards.”
Having recovered his composure, Mr Pound told The Independent: “We are going to have to re-evaluate the listenership of Radio 4. I would have expected this result if there had been a poll in The Sun. Do we really want a law that says you can slaughter anyone who climbs in your window?”
Well, it would seem that quite a lot of people do. And you know what? If there was such a law, there’d be a lot fewer burglars a-burgling.
Personally, I’m with Mr Pound in thinking that “reasonable force” ought to be sufficient. However, unlikeMr Pound, and many others, I think that the force which Tony Martin used against his attackers was itself quite reasonable, and that in general, lethal force is often a very reasonable way for householders to fight off burglars, and in the process to uphold the law (one of the laws being that you mustn’t burgle). After all, for many householders in many circumstances, the only choices available are: (a) householder shoots at intruders to kill, and therefore quite often does kill, or: (b) householder is helpless, and is duly robbed, or worse. What Official Opinion wants us all to accept is that there is a third alternative which is superior to both (a) and (b), which is: (c) the householder reports the crime, and the criminals are speedily apprehended by the Police and punished appropriately by the courts. But why is (c) so very much better than (a)? And what if (c) just about never happens, either because the burglars aren’t caught or because if they are caught they aren’t sufficiently punished?
Simon Jenkins isn’t my favourite columnist. (See here for evidence of just how fatuously wrong this man is capable of being.) But after starting off his latest column for Timesonline by denouncing the BBC for getting above itself by actually proposing legislation (and thereby setting itself up in competition with Parliament), and for failing to guide public opinion into a more proper direction, he ends up admitting that this little exercise has actually worked out rather well. It gave lots of people a chance to say that they don’t feel safe in their own homes and would like the right to defend their homes themselves, and they took it. By their insubordinate refusal to accept their duly allotted place in the grand scheme of things, the place allotted to them by people like Simon Jenkins, an important slice of public opinion got members of the pompous git classes to actually think about that proposition for a change. Jenkins’ column started out under the heading “How the BBC made democracy just a show”, but ended up saying this:
Which brings me full circle. There is virtue in the listeners’ law after all. I have debated it for an entire column. I am sure that the BBC would declare this as no more than their original intention. A listeners’ law is better than no law at all. Where indeed would we be without the BBC?
Under the circumstances, that’s quite an admission.
In the week of the increasingly embarrassing Turner Prize, here (I found it via these people) is news of some art that Samizdata can really get behind:
Since 1998 Italian artist Antonio Riello has been making very special weapons as artworks. Assault rifles, pistols, machine guns, carbines, sub-machine guns, hand grenades, rocket launchers and any kind of contemporary military guns are restyled by the artist as high fashion accessories for sophisticated ladies.
And for a certain sort of gentleman, I’m guessing. (Although those ball and chain things at the top of the picture collection don’t look to me like they’re for self defence at all.)
Weapons from all over the World are used: American M16, Russian Kalashnikov, Israelian UZI, Italian Beretta and many others. Recently also armours in steel, plastic and Kevlar are made to protect ladies against urban dangers.
Globalisation. Good.
In this artproject the glamour of fashion system is mixed with the common perverse and morbid fascination for weaponry.
Yeah yeah. They have to say that.
These works – made using leopard skins, brightly lacquered colours, jewels, furs, trendy fabrics and special technological appliances – play along the thin line between fashion and trash.
Miami Vice aesthetics you might say.
LADIES WEAPONS are a sort of hybrids born from the most outstanding contemporary Italian features: the obsession for personal security and the passion for elegance and fashion.
I would have preferred passion for personal security and obsession for elegance and fashion, but like I say, they have to say that guns are bad. This is Italy remember, not Arizona.
Every artwork has a name of a woman (“CLAUDIA”, “TAMARA”,….) and exists only in one exemplar.
Where is allowed the artist uses real weapons, in the countries where is forbidden artworks are based on perfect replicas.
“Where is allowed.” There’s your problem. And of course, “perfect replicas” are only allowed “where is allowed” also. This art is presumably illegal wherever replica guns are flaunted in places “where is not allowed”. Oh well, it all adds to the buzz.
My guess is that the Art Nazis, to coin a phrase, won’t allow this stuff to qualify, because it is itself far, far too “obsessive” about guns to be allowed into polite Euro-society. As “art”, it will never catch on. It’s typical Euro-trash half-baked goodness/uselessness, in other words. More work is needed.
This guy should stop titting about with “only in one examplar” nonsense, go to America, and mass produce these things. Forget art. Embrace the gun culture, and help to make it (even more) fashionable.
When he gets there, he will course have to deal with the fact that in America they presumably have a lot of this kind of kit already, selling healthily (not to say obsessively), with no thought of art at all.
(By the way, and flying off at somewhat of a tangent, “Art Nazis” is a phrase I recently invented, which I think may have a future. I say invented, but I googled for it after thinking of it for myself, and I did find this use of the phrase, to describe the idiot/villain art critic at the centre of Tom Wolfe’s splendid little book The Painted Word.)
It’s no good. Every time I think about Jonny’s sun-kissed fringe. Every time I think about Dallaglio’s try-setting run. Every time I think about that little girl at the airport, at 4:30am, holding up a homemade picture of the England rugby team framed in red tinsel, I feel like blubbing. Even now, as I write this, I’m filling up again. What a game.
I think it’s something to do with having children. You just start becoming emotionally incontinent about everything. Or at least that’s what has happened to me. But enough of this nonsense. I shall ask Mr Micklethwait to try to cure me by email.
But his post below set me thinking about something else. Having waded through various anarcho-capitalist tomes, in the last few months, there’s something I’ve found particularly unsatisfying about them all, as they babble on about private courts, private arbitration, and private police. Where’s the beef!
You hear tantalising snippets about successful anarcho-capitalist societies in fourth century Germany, in eleventh century Ireland, and in fifteenth century Iceland, but rarely, if ever, do you actually get to see the beef. What would an anarcho-capitalist society actually be like? And if it’s such a good thing, why didn’t the German, Irish, and Icelandic experiments sweep the world? Yes, those with the biggest spears, swords, and addictive philosophies, imposed their coercive natures upon the rest of us, and their useless miserable parasitical states. But even anarcho-capitalists will admit that even the worst dictator needs the support of the broad mass of his state’s population, or at least their grudging acceptance, in order to survive. Otherwise, as revolutions like the recent one in Georgia have shown, the dictator is curtains. → Continue reading: Can competitive law work?
Interesting legal issues are raised, I feel, by this story:
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Call it spam rage: A Silicon Valley computer programmer has been arrested for threatening to torture and kill employees of the company he blames for bombarding his computer with Web ads promising to enlarge his penis.
In one of the first prosecutions of its kind in the state that made “road rage” famous, Charles Booher, 44, was arrested on Thursday and released on bail for making repeated threats to staff of a Canadian company between May and July.
Booher threatened to send a “package full of Anthrax spores” to the company, to “disable” an employee with a bullet and torture him with a power drill and ice pick; and to hunt down and castrate the employees unless they removed him from their e-mail list, prosecutors said.
He used return e-mail addresses including Satan@hell.org.
In a telephone interview with Reuters on Friday, Booher acknowledged that he had behaved badly but said his computer had been rendered almost unusable for about two months by a barrage of pop-up advertising and e-mail.
Here’s what happened: I go to their Web site and start complaining to them, would you please, please, please stop bothering me,” he said. “It just sort of escalated … and I sort of lost my cool at that point.
I believe that Charles Booher speaks for many of us. In some ways, it strikes me, this resembles the Tony Martin case. The complaint against Martin was that he has shot one of his burglar-tormenters in the back. But since this burglar had attacked him repeatedly and since his latest attack provided yet further evidence that, if he could, he would be back, it made sense to me for Martin to shoot him in the back in self defence, against his next attack.
Booher requested, then demanded, that his computer to be left alone. But alas, Booher was unaware that his replies merely proved that he and his email were real, so the bombardments immediately intensified. But given that Booher was unlikely ever to catch these miscreants, was it not reasonable for him to threaten complete ghastliness in the unlikely event that he did? Had he known with certainty who they were, such bloodcurdling threats as Booher’s would have been excessive. More mundane remedies would have been sufficient. However, for people who behave as Booher’s tormentors behaved, is there not a case for the reintroduction of something like hanging, drawing and quartering? Or maybe crucifixion?
I agree, probably a bit over the top. But Booher’s rather extreme reaction does serve to remind us all of just what a problem spam is now becoming for many people, and that if the free market does not spread around some answers to the problems of people like Booher, governments will be only to ready to use his plight to impose their own much more draconian arrangements, in the form of alleged cures that will almost certainly turn out worse than the disease, but whose worseness will only become obvious when it is all in place and impossible then to reverse.
I for one would love to have a comment string explaining how ‘anti-spam,’ software works, what principles it follows, how it avoids stopping good stuff while still stopping the bad, and so on. Maybe Booher’s problem has already been solved, and the only problem that remains is telling him and everyone like him what this solution is.
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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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