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]
|
It is such a comfort to know that our public authorities are prepared to crack down hard on this sort of thing:
A prison officer was sacked for making an allegedly insulting remark about Osama bin Laden two months after the September 11 attacks, an employment tribunal heard yesterday.
Colin Rose, 53, was told he had to go because, although he did not know it, three Muslim visitors could have heard his “insensitive” comment about the world’s most reviled terrorist.
The assistant governor at Blundeston Prison, near Lowestoft, Suffolk, gave him a ticking off at the time. But he was sacked after a six-month investigation.
Mr Rose, a former Coldstream Guardsman with a 21-year unblemished record in the Prison Service, is claiming unfair dismissal.
The Norwich hearing was told that on Nov 15, 2001, he threw some keys into a metal chute at the prison gatehouse. When someone said it sounded as if he had thrown them so hard that they were going through the tray at the bottom of the chute, Mr Rose said: “There’s a photo of Osama bin Laden there.”
Just in case Mr Rose happens to be reading this, he should memorise and repeat the following statement:
“Osama bin Laden is merely the poor, desperate victim of oppression and social injustice”.
With sufficient sensitivity training, I am quite confident that unpleasantness of this nature can be avoided in the future.
Arnold Kling of the Bottom Line (one of the Corante blogs) has blogged about an email exchange with one of the ‘intellectuals’ over at Crooked Timber. He suggested that they actually read one of his essays before denouncing them as illegitimate. The reply he received was incredible. I suppose that is how liberals argue…
Arthur Kling (AK): Thanks for the comment. I am in favor of providing health care subsidies for the poor. What I object to is the notion that a middle class that supposedly cannot afford to pay for health insurance on its own can somehow magically tax itself to pay for health insurance.
Crooked Timber ‘intellectual’ (CTI): Tax the upper class. Why don’t they figure into your calculations? Are your usual readers stupid enough to be swayed by such foolishness? Do you really think “big government liberals” believe what you claim they do? (I suspect that you do: your imagined opponents are all idiots who can’t appreciate your impeccable logic.)
How about establishing a government health insurance system to eliminate the 30% overhead that “entrepreneurs” typically extract? Despite libertarian cant about government inefficiency, government insurance programs get by with less than 3% administrative costs. Seems that might make health care a bit more affordable. (I know that fact will be hard to accept, since it contradicts the dogma you adhere to, but it’s a hard world.)
AK: Sorry that the point was unclear.
CTI: It was indeed. Are you sure the obfuscation was unintended?
AK: Thanks for taking the time to read the essay.
CTI: You’re welcome. Wish I felt it had been better spent.
There is more rudeness, arrogance and supercilious invectives. Judge for yourselves.
Some people have far too much time on their hands:
The County of Los Angeles actively promotes and is committed to ensure a work environment that is free from any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived. As such, it is the County’s expectation that our manufacturers, suppliers and contractors make a concentrated effort to ensure that any equipment, supplies or services that are provided to County departments do not possess or portray an image that may be construed as offensive or defamatory in nature.
One such recent example included the manufacturer’s labeling of equipment where the words “Master/Slave” appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label.
Okay, how about we use the term ‘Boss-man/Bitch’?
Guardian’s crime correspondent reports that scam-baiting – replying to the emails and stringing the con artists along with a view to humiliating them as much as possible – is becoming increasingly popular with more than 150 websites chronicling the often hilarious results.
Mike, a 41-year-old computer engineer from Manchester, runs the scam-baiting site 419eater.com, which started two months ago.
Almost always the scammer will think you are a real victim and try their best to extract money. It started because I used to get a few emails, and although I knew it was a scam I never knew how it worked. I did some research, found out about scam baiting and decided to have a go. It’s now almost a full-time hobby for me.
His site specialises in collecting pictures of the scammers in order to make it more difficult to find new victims. Using the pretext that in order to believe they are real people they need to take a photograph holding up signs with the name of Mike’s character, he has succeeded in getting one fraudster to pose with a piece of paper stating: MI Semen Stains. Other sites feature similar pictures with signs reading ‘Iama Dildo’, ‘Mr Bukakke’ and ‘Ben Dover’.
According to Guardian the oldest anti-scammer site is Scamorama, which aims to educate the public about the latest trends as well as waste as much of the fraudsters’ time as possible. The original emails often claim the author has suffered a personal tragedy, usually the loss of a parent. A typical Scamorama reply claimed the recipient has also lost a parent in shocking circumstances, having witnessed their own father being shot. The email was signed ‘Alfredo Corleone’.
I had a go at some of the stories on the 419 Eater website and I recommend you have a look too. Marvellous stuff. What a way to brighten up a dull morning.
Brave, crusading, iconoclastic Guardian correspondent Matthew Tempest is striking out against the evil, right-wing, corporate-media conspiracy that is actively suppressing the truth:
It’s an unthinking, immutable truth for the mainstream media that young people are not interested in politics.
So, if they were permitted to read about it, many of that media’s consumers/readers would be surprised to learn that today something like 60,000 mostly twentysomething people from all over Europe will gather in Paris, unpaid, in their own time…
No-one is permitted to read about this. It is unclean. It is seditious. It is dangerous propoganda and, I swear, if you even cast your eyes over so much as a single sentence of it, your door will be knocked down and you will be dragged away by the jackbooted goons of the Bushista-Berlusconi-Murdoch Mind-Control Reich and subjected to continuous loops of Fox News until your eyeballs explode.
…to sit through four days, 10 hours a day, of..
Nose-picking, navel-gazing and self-abuse.
…lectures, seminars and talks on politics.
Same thing.
And it’s not just any old politics. The topics are largely esoteric, complex and abstract…
Translation:a load of incontinent, incomprehensible drivel.
Until today, the ESF had almost no coverage in the mainstream British media.
Well, what do you expect? Nobody dare speak of such things, lest they be ‘eliminated’ by the all-seeing, all-knowing, omnipotent Zionist-Corporate-Illuminati World Control Machine.
The event is the European Social Forum…
No kidding?!! → Continue reading: Mass debating in Paris
Although I still maintain that I do not take iCan all too seriously, I have bunged a new ‘campaign journal’ up and also written the same piece up as an iCan ‘article’ called Neither chaos nor regulatory dystopia. iCan is wildly convoluted and a real nightmare to navigate and I could not figure out how to ‘attach’ the article to Anti-Activist Activism.
I did however find out how to attach the article to iCan ‘issues’, such as ‘direct democracy’, where I am sure it will be about as welcome as a turd on a billiard table 
I can’t wait to see their election manifesto:
Anti-war activists including the Guardian columnist George Monbiot are planning to form a coalition to challenge the Labour party in the European and local elections in June.
The attempt to unite socialist parties, anti-globalisation campaigners, peace activists, and faith groups, including Muslims, has already aroused the hostility of the Green party, which is branding the electoral project as “unhelpful”.
The Green hostility is understandable. They can’t very well be expected to just sit back and do nothing in the face of this open challenge to their monopoly on crackpot drivel.
The Conservative Party has been blessed with a ringing endorsement from none other than Polly Toynbee:
A remarkable document has emerged from the Conservative frontbench. Search it from cover to cover and few would guess its provenance. Its deceptively dull title hides a radical departure: Old Europe? Demographic change and pension reform, by David Willetts, the shadow secretary for work and pensions, transforms Conservative family policy.
Not even his economics smells of Conservatism. The pensions problem does not, Willetts declares, need more saving by today’s workers. “Europe needs more consumption, more spending and more borrowing. Keynes warned in the 30s that ageing societies with high levels of savings and not many investment opportunities face a deflationary nightmare.”
So, is this just a devlishly cunning bit of cognitive jiu-jitsu to throw their opponents? I don’t believe they are anywhere near clever enough for that.
I think the end is nigh.
As I type, the American magician David Blaine is suspended in a perspex box above the River Thames in London in which state he intends to remain for a period of forty-four days with water but no food. For the life of me I cannot see what ‘magic’ is involved in this process but I will concede some moderate appreciation of his will to endure.
Rather less appreciate is the seemingly endless procession of London low-life who have taken it into their heads to try to sabotage him:
Protesters today tried to attack the cage holding illusionist David Blaine next to the Thames.
In a dramatic raid just before 5am a man scaled a scaffold support tower which is connected to Blaine’s perspex cage. Two accomplices had diverted security guards. The protester then tried to cut through the cable supplying water to the illusionist who is in the 10th day of his 44-day endurance challenge.
Excuse me, but protestors? What, precisely, are they supposed to be protesting about? Has David Blaine been oppressing the Palestinians? Did he invade Iraq? Has he contributed to starvation in Africa? Is he lining his pockets from ‘unfair trade’?
I submit that the term ‘anti-social thugs’ is far more accurate and appropriate.
There is an awful lot of this kind of thing appearing in the mainstream British press right now and I cannot help but wonder if it isn’t a faint echo of the ‘root causes’ mentality: the tendency to ameliorate malevolence by ascribing to its perpetrators the implication they are driven by some sort of legitimate grievance. Hence, their actions can be both explained and excused.
Whilst there stands no comparison whatsoever with Mr.Blaine’s bone-headed tormentors, I am quite convinced that if Adolf Hitler and his cronies were on the march today the press in this country would insist on referring to them as ‘German militants’. Likewise, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge would be described as ‘peace activists’.
The Volokh Conspiracy highlights the jailing of an antiques dealer “for conspiring to receive antiquities claimed by a foreign government, in this case Egypt.”
This has been an earthquake of sorts for the American trade in antiquities, it is an open secret that most of the material is assembled against various foreign laws. Previously the American law was applied only to thefts from museums, churches, private homes, and the like, now for the first time it is being applied to thefts from archaeological sites. Dealers suddenly wonder whether they can stay in business. Observers wonder what is the difference between licit and illicit antiquities dealers, given how much of the material comes from sites.
Although the Volokh Conspirator agonizes over this issue in seeking a proper libertarian solution to the problems posed by the antiquities trade, it seems to me that the solution is quite simple in principle, and that the problem is entirely a creation of overweening governments.
As with any other item, an antiquity is properly on the market if the seller has proper title to it. For an old vase recovered from an archaeological site, the answer to who has title is (or should be) quite simple. The vase belongs to the archaeologist (or other person) who found it, unless it was found on private land, in which case it belongs to the landowner. The vase is, essentially, lost/abandoned/mislaid property in the sense that no one knows who the original (or last) owner was and/or no one can trace their living descendants. Under the common law, such property discovered anywhere other than private land belonged to the finder as against anyone but the true owner, meaning in an archeological context that the antiquities belong to the archaeologist, unless the dig was on private land, in which case it belongs to the owner.
The “problem” posed by the antiquities trade is entirely a creation of overweening governments, which have asserted a wholly unjustified ownership interest in all antiquities discovered within their borders. If one disregards this claim (as the American courts apparently did until this most recent case), then in principle it becomes possible to construct a valid chain of title for antiquities, and thus possible for the trade in these items to go forward on the same basis as every other line of business.
One wonders how other countries, especially the French (as I understand Paris is the center of gravity of the arts and antiquities trade), deal with this issue.
Given its provenance (and prominence) as a marxist tool, class analysis is something which both conservatives and classical liberals tend to ignore. To the extent that people whose politics fall within those groupings understand it at all, they respond to the mere mention of the term with an understandable degree of horror.
But that’s a shame because the examination of class interests can be a very useful means for analysing problems and even discovering possible solutions. I believe it can every bit as useful for individualists as it has been for collectivists.
In his latest Telegraph editorial, George Trefgarne, wields a bit of class analysis in formidable fashion:
I can’t help thinking we need an English Poujade, to speak up for the little person and take on our own Left-Bankers. You know the type. Self-satisfied and pleased with themselves, they are the new Establishment who have deposed the old, traditional elite.
It is they, rather than your stereotypical Tory squires, who thrive in such institutions as universities, the Church, Whitehall and the BBC. Only the Armed Forces seem to be holding out against them. They are hung-up about class, contemptuous of tradition and love petty gestures such as refusing to curtsy to the Queen or abolishing the Lord Chancellor because he wears tights.
If you question their beliefs, they will express disdain, mock you for being old-fashioned, suggest you are immoral or dim, and – their trump card – racist. But the truth is they are, for the most part, members of the government salariat, who live off taxpayers’ money.
It sounds as if Mr.Trefgarne may have read about the Enemy Class. If he hasn’t, he should. In any event he has made a worthy stab at identifying a potential counter-class:
But the real economic pain is being shouldered by the generation I like to call the Baby Busters – those in their twenties and thirties who are the children of the Baby Boomers born after the war.
Unlike some previous generations, Baby Busters find it easy to get a job. But they are an assetless group, groaning with debts. Baby Busters graduate from university with thousands of pounds of loans to pay off; they cannot afford to get on to the housing ladder as prices have soared to their highest ever level (when measured as a multiple of incomes); they are not saving for a pension because the stakeholder wheezes that the Government invented for them are a flop; and they are not earning enough to progress in life.
The ‘busters’ are groaning under the weight of supporting a monstrously overgrown state; the result of their parents endless demands for interventions and government largesse.
Everywhere, their opportunities are restricted by the growth of government, bureaucracy and rising taxation. Yet no political party seems to care about the Baby Busters. They are a rabble, waiting for a rouser.
We’re trying, Mr.Trefgarne, we’re trying.
The Financial Times has long dined out on its reputation as an institution steeped in sound economic principles combined with dispassionate and admirably non-partisan reportage.
The truth is that, for the last few years, that reliable old standard of fiscal soundness has been an amplifier of third-way, interventionist euro-mummery and the kind of kumbaya hand-wringing that most of us more normally associate with the Guardian. Sad yes, but predictably concordant with the miasmic and corrosive spirit of our age.
However, I detect a change afoot and not for the good. If this preposterously fawnographic article on Noam Chomsky is anything to by, then maybe the FT is about to pack up its wagon and head on out into the wild, barren scrubland of drooling lefty-lunacy:
Noam Chomsky pokes fun at President George W. Bush’s “original vision” of a Palestinian state, and the audience chuckles. He talks of Ronald Reagan as “our cowboy leader” and they guffaw. He reminds them that the Reagan administration once described Nicaragua as a grave military threat and they practically roll in the aisles.”
The he tells them the one about two gay guys who go into a bar and they double-up in spasms of choking hysteria. Noam Chomsky: the comic’s comic.
The collective sniggering makes everyone feel at one, and the US’s dissident-in-chief is not above being clubbish.
Nor is he above being childish. In fact, he makes a handsome living out of it.
On this warm evening in a suburban Boston church, they are looking to their unofficial leader for a renewed sense of purpose.
They’ll be looking for a very long time. → Continue reading: From pink to red
|
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.
|
