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]
|
Collin May of Innocents Abroad writes:
Once again Europe demonstrates its superior sophistication in matters international. As the Telegraph reports, Europe’s foreign ministers have decided to move a meeting with the Southern African Development Community from Denmark to Mozambique. The reason for the move is simple: to accommodate the foreign minister from that pillar of humanitarianism, Zimbabwe.
EU foreign ministers were supposed to hold the meeting in Copenhagen on Nov 7 and 8. But several delegations from the 14-nation African bloc hinted that they would boycott the gathering unless the Zimbabwean government was included.
Rather inconveniently, the European Parliament passed a unanimous resolution last month demanding that Mr Mudenge, the Zimbabwe foreign minister, be banned from the meeting.
Geoffrey Van Orden, a Tory MEP and author of the resolution, called the move “an absolute affront”, saying it was yet another example of the EU’s “utter hopelessness” in sticking to a clear line in foreign policy.
“We’ve agreed to move a whole meeting to Africa to avoid an internal row within the EU over enforcement of our own sanctions policy. That’s what it amounts to”
Any chance of an explosive and fatal internal row about the whole EU? Please?!
The intrepid Samizdata Team sent a significant expedition to darkest Shoreditch, in London’s East End, to attend the The Illustrated Ape Party at the Electricity Showrooms.
There was much drinking…
And extremely loud music…
And many many people…
Who watched acts of ‘Art Terrorism’…
All of which might, or might not, make today’s Samizdata posts a bit… strange.
Thank God Stalin antedated Photoshop.
– Alex Kroll Jr in a comment on this posting last Sunday.
A commendably good analysis from James C. Bennett on the strategic decisions facing Australia following the Bali massacre:
“In Australia, there are two competing interpretations of the Bali attacks. Which one prevails will be critical to the security of Australia and Australians, and important to the United States. One interpretation sees the attacks as a consequence of Australian support for the U.S. policy in Afghanistan and on the issue of Iraq. Its conclusion is that Australia should cut and run, and hope not to be attacked again.
The other sees the attacks as evidence that Australia has no options in this war; that Australians were attacked not for what Australia had done, but for what Australians were. They see, quite correctly, that if radical Islamists conclude that the easiest way to change Australian behavior is to kill a substantial number of Australians, then Australians will be murdered in large numbers again and again.”
He also examines the potentially catastrophic consequences for the Balinese.
James has an audacious talent for getting to the heart of the matter without cant or hyperbole and by my reckoning he has hit a multitude of nails squarely on the head yet again.
I was prompted by Perry’s post below to refer to a London newspaper story I saw yesterday.
The fig-leaf justification provided for establishing a panopticon state is that we all be a lot safer as a result. Pity it didn’t work in the case of this gut-wrenching story of a man who was set upon by a gang outside an underground station in North London and beaten to death for no other reason than he had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Where was all the security state apparatus? What about all those CCTV cameras? Do you think this man’s family might want to ask themselves why they’re being sold a pup?
Police States are all about security; not our security, mind.
Across London, these posters can be seen telling us all that we are ‘Secure beneath The Watchful Eyes’ of the Metropolitan Police. I cannot tell you how much better that makes me feel. The imagery is pure 1930’s/1940’s and conjurors up the ‘Golden Age of Totalitarianism’.
Britain is already a Police State in so far as the means for total repression are already well and truly in place. As the poster indicates all too well, Britain is the nation most under surveillance on Earth, Echelon monitors our domestic communications, our Internet usage is logged for years due to the Draconian RIP Act, our locations detected via our mobile phones and logged, all for the apparatus of state to access on very low level authority. Civilians are not just deprived of any firearms, in reality we are forbidden to defend ourselves and our property with so much as a broom stick. Our right to trial by Jury faces abridgement, even our ancient protection of Habeas Corpus is now a dead letter under European extradition laws.
Yes, we still have a fairly free press, in so far as the media are strong enough to prevent restrictions against their actions… yet do not dare to make an allegedly ‘racist’ remark or pour scorn on someone’s religion or make a joke about Wales: if you do then expect to find yourself up in front of the Beak justifying yourself under threat of fine or gaol, and forget saying “I was just exercising my right to freedom of speech”.
Is it any surprise that the powers that be feel they can dare put posters announcing that you are ‘Secure beneath The Watchful Eyes’. Secure? From what? Surveillance increases daily at the same times as crime soars out of control, so if we are not ‘secure’ from crime, then what exactly is being secured? We face many threats in the modern world but the biggest comes from the people who would watch our every action so that the State may choose to judge us when it sees fit.
How long before we start seeing this poster?
Update: See follow up articles to this one on Samizdata.net here and here
If you still haven’t had enough of my postings on Iraq, here is one that describes just how the news we hear about Iraq is obtained, restricted and processed.
Having read Salam Pax blog and other ‘inside Iraq’ articles, I am now convinced of what has so far been a conjecture based on my experience of communism. Nightmares do not fade that easily and I recognise this is as the same stuff of which ‘the Evil Empire’ was made and 1984 written about. In its pervasiveness and destructiveness it is often beyond understanding of a free individual.
Tim Evans of the Centre for the New Europe has just emailed me to tell me about the blog which the CNE have been quietly running for the last few weeks, or at any rate quietly enough for me not to notice it until now. It’s called The Pulse, and looks well worth a regular read. And hello, what is this? Goodness me, a fulsomely admiring link to this. Coincidences will never cease. Of course what that actually shows is that Tim Evans is a man who knows how to get a blog noticed.
Rather more seriously, I think that The Pulse is part of the answer to that question we all ask from time to time: How Can I Get Paid To Blog? Because I get the definite feeling that The Pulse’s regulars, Tim himself, Helen Govett, Stephen Pollard, Helen Disney, Johan Hjertqvist (the last two being new names to me), are not exactly starving as a result of their association with this blog. The CNE is a real-world olde-world, meat-space institution – with secretaries, carpets, conferences, a website with swank pictures of the honchos shaking hands with swank politicians – in short with money, money that it is presumably willing to dole out in noticeable amounts to the right blogicians.
Interesting too that The Pulse follows the Samizdata example of having a team of bloggers, to make sure that it keeps fresh and keeps coming.
(PS: While checking the link to Stephen Pollard’s blog, I found myself reading his piece yesterday (Oct 22) on the impact of the Bali bomb on the thinking of the “Bali generation”, originally for the Wall Street Journal of Europe. I can’t make any sense of Stephen’s targetted links and I’m sure that’s just me, but this piece is most interesting.)
There’s a little flurry of debate going on about oil, and what it’s used for. Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas (Tuesday Oct 22 – the direct link doesn’t work) has just one word to say to us: plastics. His point is a good one: oil is not just for making cars and lorries go. Our entire economies now depend on it.
And here’s another point about oil. It is said by some of its opponents that the war that GWB2 wants to start Real Soon Now is really only about oil, only about keeping western economies well supplied, only about economics. And it is agreed by almost everyone that the President is being so delicate with the Saudis, again only because of the vast amounts of oil that they dispose of.
Only? War is a matter of life and death, but so is economics. I’m not saying that this war is/will be only an oil war. (I don’t think this at all as it happens, but that’s not my argument here.) Nor am I saying that all oil wars are good wars. Nor am I saying that the Saudis should be allowed to get away with absolutely anything, and with paying for absolutely anything, for ever, because giving them a seeing to would be too costly, in oil. I’m merely saying this: that when economies flounder people die. They go out of business, get divorced, get stressed and die of heart attacks, commit suicide. They torment one another, beat their kids, the kids leave home, the kids rob people, the kids kill people, the kids die, …
How many gallons of oil are worth the life, by which I mean the death, of one young soldier? It’s not a stupid or merely a rhetorical question. The serious answer cannot be that no amount of oil could possibly be worth any blood. No amount? Any? Just think about that.
All those studies proving that poverty is bad for you and can even kill you are true. They’re wrong only when they say that the way to reduce poverty is to nationalise it.
noun. A cartoon/comic related weblog, either pertaining to cartoons/comics or featuring graphics of that nature.
Please do as Lynn of Poet and Peasant, who posted this link, says: This deserves maximum exposure. Read it. Link to it. Forward it to your congressman. Print it out and give it to people who think they can get all the news they need from TV.
In the article, Farideh Tehrani, a 27-year old woman in Tehran, implores: Please tune out the biased and shallow works of journalists who use their pens to editorialize rather than report news. To us as Iranians, that is unfathomable. Don’t you realize that when we read your work, we ask what good is free press if it does not report the truth?
At this moment in our history, Iranians have limited means to voice our calls to the world beyond the rapidly crumbling walls of the clerical regime. We have a sense of urgency. Yet we feel left behind by the very champions of civil rights, human rights, and liberal reform who once dominated headlines. Don’t abandon us now, not at this junction in our history.
“…..in order to restore international peace and security”
Draft of the US-British Resolution on Iraq. Peace and Security. Ha.
Bomb us already, stop pussyfooting.
– Salam Pax
|
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.
|
