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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Good news: it wasn’t merely some US policy wonk/adviser/pundit doing the calling, it was a Muslim. Bad news: it got him a death sentence. Good news: this death sentence has been and continues to be big news.
I know I’m following tracks trod by many, many others. Nevertheless I here add my little vocal chords to the chorus of support for thoughts along these lines, and of complaint that the man has been sentenced to death for voicing them.
I’ll spare you any further profound thoughts from me about Islam, exact nature of, menace of, blah blah blah, except to say that it seems to me a particular moral duty that those, like me, who have complained about such things as the “inherently beligerent” nature of Islam should note at least some evidence to suggest another interpretation of Islam’s nature, at least potentially, as and when it crops up.
So here’s a quote from the man himself, Hashem Aghajari, from his already much quoted speech of June 2002 that got him into all the trouble:
The Islam of today is different. It is very clear that we have a different understanding of it in all areas, including economics. It has to suit the thoughts and realities of today. Just as people at the dawn of Islam conversed with the Prophet, we have the right to do this today. Just as they interpreted what was conveyed [to them] at historical junctures, we must do the same. We cannot say: ‘Because this is the past we must accept it without question.’ This is putting too much emphasis on the past. This is not logical.
For years, young people were afraid to open a Koran. They said, ‘We must go ask the Mullahs what the Koran says,’ [since] it was used primarily in mosques and cemeteries. The new generation was not allowed to come near the Koran; [young people] were told that [first] they needed [training in] 101 methods of thought and they did not possess them. Consequently, [the young people] feared reading the Koran.
Then came Shariati, and he told the young people that these ideas were bankrupt; [he said] you could understand the Koran using your own methods – you could understand as well as the religious leaders who claim to have a ton of knowledge. The religious leaders taught that if you understand the Koran on your own, you have committed a crime. They feared that their racket would cease to exist if young people learned [Koran] on their own.
Ignoramus that I am, I have no idea who “Shariati” is (comment please).
Follow the link above, and you also find Thomas Friedman in a New York Times article (“A story worth watching”), reproduced by The Iranian, saying this:
What’s going on in Iran today is, without question, the most promising trend in the Muslim world. It is a combination of Martin Luther and Tiananmen Square – a drive for an Islamic reformation combined with a spontaneous student-led democracy movement.
And there are plenty of other enticing links. Follow. Copy. Paste. Comment. When the words “Hashem Aghajari” are typed into a search engine, let the hit number just keep on rising and rising.
I got this far by going to IndyMedia from (who else?) Instapundit, who has long been saying, for example here and then a few days later here, that all public Muslim moves in the right direction deserve the blogosphere’s support. Indeed.
You don’t stop violent crime by devoting resources to making excuses look less reasonable.
– Alice Bachini
I recommend a longish piece that Michael Jennings has just put up about the truly extraordinary Hollywood machinations which resulted in the three Lord of the Rings movies getting made, by an “insane bearded New Zealander”. I haven’t seen any of these movies, but I enthusiastically concur with this concluding observation:
… At least one insane bearded New Zealander is now insanely rich. And I think a world in which insane bearded New Zealanders can become insanely rich by making ludicrously over-ambitious movies is better than one where this is not the case. …
Quite so. The insane New Zealander is obviously quite a character, but even more extraordinary is the person who produced these movies, someone called Bob Shaye. It’s a real feet-in-the-gutter but eyes-on-the-stars story.
I took the liberty of looking at the Jennings site meter, to see if saying this here could be expected to make any difference to anything. Apparently, it might. I think Jennings deserves a lot more readers than he’s now getting.
Last week I watched a typical British Channel 4 documentary about the “hunt for the Washington snipers”, shown last Thursday evening. It told a reasonably convincing factual story, and you didn’t get the feeling of axes being ground. There were some routine clichés involved, but not, you felt, because the programme makers wanted to push them, merely because those clichés seemed, to them, the things to say.
The most obvious such cliché was the claim, emitted more than once, yet undermined by a lot of the facts being presented as well as reinforced by others, that “the media” were interrupting the investigation.
From where I sat, the media pretty much were the investigation. The police, in the person of the sublimely named Chief Moose, seemed merely to be a rather helpless, hopeless clearing house for clues, and a maker of appropriate public speeches after each successive murder. “This is terrible. If you know what happened, call us.” They did nothing that a bunch of geeks in an upstairs student lodging couldn’t have done, or so it seemed.
As the blogosphere has already explained, the clinching Clue (a vehicle description and a vehicle number plate) was only released to the general public by those Media, despite the best efforts of Moose and his men to stop this Clue getting around.
Now, aside from a bit of teasing about the wretched man’s name which I’m afraid I can’t resist (a name which only a very daring novelist of the Tom Wolfe variety would have presumed to make up if telling such a story – and damn me there’s another name!), I’m not here to sneer at Chief Moose. Moose was only operating within a model of police work that has been the dominant “narrative” of how you do these things since as far back as the days of J. Edgar Hoover. Faced with a complicated and important crime, such as a string of lurid murders of non-lowlife people, you centralise information. It’s like a military operation. You no more rely on “the public” or “the media” to win your battle for you without your paternal control and guidance than you would expect a similarly anarchic arrangement to scam Nazi Germany about where the Normandy landings were going to happen (i.e. scam them into thinking it wasn’t Normandy). That kind of thing has to be a big old hundreds-of-people-at-hundreds-of-desks job.
And in the dying days of the “old” media, there is still a rationale to this. The point is, the old media are pretty much like a big old government bureaucracy, except not as sensible. In many ways the old media combine the bad features of a government bureaucracy (ignoring vital clues, obsessing about irrelevant clues, institutionalising the silly prejudices of a few powerful people) with the bad features of a mob (all following the most vigorously mobile mob-member however silly, trampling in a herd over the top of vital clues, jumping to silly conclusions).
A key moment in the Washington snipers story concerned the immediate fate of that vital Clue. Moose’s worry – and it was a perfectly genuine one – was that The Media would shove The Clue up on nationwide TV, and the Bad Guys would see The Clue before anyone else who had also seen The Clue had got around to spotting the Bad Guys in the vehicle referred to by The Clue, and the Bad Guys would dump the vehicle and carry on murdering from a different vehicle. Bye bye The Clue. Four more non-lowlife bodies. More Moose nightmares.
But now enter the blogosphere. → Continue reading: Chief Moose versus the Wolves – on not letting the Bad Guys see The Clue coming at them until it’s too late
Admissions are mostly made by those who do not know their importance.
– Mr Justice Darling, Scintillae Juris, 1889
Back in March of this year I did a posting here saying that Japan will be back, and ever since then I have been keeping a particular eye out for Japan news in whatever media stuff came my way. The most startling thing I has spotted so far was an article in the November issue of Prospect, by Eamonn Fingleton, called “Japan’s fake funk”, which says that Japan never went away, and the only surprise will be when the West realises it. This article was subsequently made available here at Financial Review. (My thanks to John Ray for supplying the link to this.) Whatever you think of this piece, it certainly makes fascinating reading. Here’s how it starts:
FOR A DECADE now, the western consensus has been that Japan is an economic basket case. But this is a dramatic misreading of a perennially secretive society. Indeed, it may come to be seen as one of the most significant misreadings in economic history.
Fingleton goes on to argue that Japan’s alleged economic woes are just that – alleged – and that actually Japan is doing very well thank you. It is racing ahead in numerous vital technologies, its standard of living is not at all in decline, and its financial woes are greatly exaggerated. Economically, says Fingleton, Japan has now overtaken the USA.
Why then do the Japanese still send out SOS messages? Because, says Fingleton, it suits them to. Being regarded as a basket case means that they get an easy ride diplomatically from the USA, while they cosy up to the Chinese, who are in Fingleton’s opinion about to emerge any decade now as the world’s dominant economy.
Fingleton is the author of In Praise of Hard Industries, published in 1999, which denounced the internet stock fad for being a fad, so he has something of a pedigree. But is he right?
Or is he just the latest in a long line of dirigiste-inclined self-deluders who regard only certain parts of the economy (in his case big and complicated machines) as being “real” (as opposed to “information” which he reckons is not so real), in the same way that people used to say that only agriculture was real and that manufacturing, and then “finance”, was economic frippery by comparison.
This emailer to Brunton et al. (“Trader”) dismisses Fingleton’s piece as “nonsense”, for all the usual financial reasons that we’ve become familiar with. Fingleton regards people like “Trader” as self-deluders.
Other commentators have made much of Japan’s alleged demographic woes, in the form of a rapidly aging population.
Well, who is right?
If the technological facts assembled by Fingleton are right – Japan racing ahead in “key technologies”, like supercomputers, machine tools, and so forth – then if Japan is in decline, it is in a very odd sort of decline, caused, it would seem, by them financing high technology for the rest of us at a loss, and thus becoming the world’s best informed paupers. Sort of technological monks, you might say.
I don’t know what the truth is about all this, but I would like to very much. Comments?
Brotherhood, solidarity, unity, love: they all mean these but not those, you but not them.
– Michael Frayn, Constructions, 1974
Here’s another “wonder of capitalism story. Yes folks, Internet connections on passenger airplanes. As Patrick Crozier of Transport Blog, who piloted me to the story, puts it:
Look, no Ministers of Transport, no Euro-directives, no dirigisme. Isn’t greed good.
I suppose, what with Samizdata being in the gloomy mood it’s in just now, various among us will find ways to be depressed even about this. Either (a) it will offer terrorists new ways to hijack airplanes, blow them up or even fly them into famous landmarks, without even being on them. Or else (b) it will be annoying to have to sit next to a surfer or emailer, especially if he has a sound card. Like portable phones on trains all over again, in other words.
But I’m impressed. Patrick has now bestowed upon me automatic posting rights to Transport Blog, for when he isn’t in the mood. So maybe one day I’ll do a celebratory posting to TB from an airplane:
“Patrick and transportsmen everywhere, how are you my old mates? How’s things? Trains all late as usual, are they? Cars and buses and lorries all jammed up? Good, good. I’m now two and half minutes away from landing at Stanstead. I estimate I’m somewhere north of Watford. I’ve been delayed by strong cross winds but I’ll be at arrivals in thirty three minutes and expect to be back at base in one hour and forty seven and a quarter minutes, approximately, can’t be sure exactly. You may have to delay the meeting by three and a bit minutes, maybe four. Or so. I’m doing my final approach now. The flaps are coming out into flap mode. The wheels are now down. No, I tell a lie. Yes, here they come. Oops. Rather bumpy, my son, rather bumpy. But mustn’t grumble, know what I mean? Have to unplug now. See you at head office in one hour, forty two and eleven sixteenths minutes. Give or take. Gotta rush.”
Maybe not. Seriously, when I’m actually on that airplane I’ll have something better than that to say, and it will be good to keep up with the blogs. I think this is very good news.
Richard Miniter, who gave a speech at the Libertarian Alliance conference described by David Carr, enthusiastically recommends this essay by David Warren, entitled “Wrestling with Islam”, which I missed when it came out during last month.
Choosing paragraphs to excerpt is difficult, because, as Miniter says, it is all so good. Try this:
Elsewhere, we encounter the old elites, but find them like beached whales, still nominally presiding over the societies which they have helped destroy, economically, socially, religiously, and in every other practical way, so that there was nothing left for them but to find a new excuse for holding on to power, and someone else to blame for what happened.
In Pakistan, for instance, the elites are certainly still there, only beginning to be diluted by the arrivistes from the Islamist madrasas. From the other side, they are bled by emigration, for the engineers and the technocrats, and the other functionaries of the New Class, are leaving as fast as they can to the West. It is an economic imperative, there are diminishing opportunities at home; for where there is no oil to pump and refine, there tends to be precious little else in the way of an economy. They wash their hands of all those five-year plans, and get quite peacefully on planes for Europe and America, where they can hope at least to stay solvent. And all they are really leaving behind is the poor of their societies, to fend for themselves.
The New Class that remains, which by now is becoming rather an old class, finds itself enmired in a more and more urgent search for some new silver bullet, some fine new theoretical scheme to replace the tried-and-failed socialism, if for no other reason than to justify their own purchase on elitehood. The alternative is to slide down from eminence, into those mushrooming brick, stick, tin & mud suburbs that they must fear in a way that we, who have not seen them up so close, can never fully understand or empathize with. It is no small thing to lose your place in the social order; and especially in an order with such deep shafts.
→ Continue reading: David Warren wrestles with Islam
Last night I needed to make a tube journey, but the combination of ticket machines unwilling to take notes and ticket booths without staff meant that having arrived at my local tube station I had to leave it again and buy something – anything – just to get some change. Annoying. But the thing I did buy, a copy of yesterday’s Times, did contain a couple of valuable items. There was a deeply scary story about how Germany is going to hell in a handcart, by Rosemary Righter. And there was this letter to the Editor, which put the policies of the European Union in an even more negative light:
Poland and the EU
From Mr Rodney E. B. Atkinson
Sir, I have just returned from a book promotion in Poland, where even those MPs who had been in the forefront of opposition to the Communists told me that they found the EU far more oppressive and dismissive of Polish nationhood than their previous Soviet masters.
Laws were being forced through the Polish Parliament, at the behest of the EU, which had never appeared in any party manifesto, with little debate and which were not yet even law in the existing EU member states.
Perhaps the most insidious new provision in the Polish Constitution is that a law can be enforced in Poland even if it has not been translated into Polish. There can be no more disgraceful indicator of the true nature of the European Union as it constitutionally imprisons nations which so recently escaped from a different tyranny.
Yours etc,
RODNEY E. B. ATKINSON,
Alderley,
Meadowfield Road,
Stocksfield,
Northumberland NE43 7PZ.
December 3.
It was the last paragraph that got me. I hope that gets bounced around the blogosphere. It deserves to.
Sean Gabb‘s account of the debate he took part in yesterday evening, already referred to here (and assuming that yesterday is the proper word for the day that only ended a little over an hour ago), is already up and readable on his own website. The full text of what he said is there, together with his account of some other things he said during the Q&A. Recommended.
The titbit in the report of the evening that interested me most was somewhat off the central agenda. It seems that after the debate, which all went very smoothly and politely by the way, Sean was challenged in a rather interesting way by a young woman in the audience:
She began with flattery. She was a reader, she said, of Free Life Commentary on my web page and found it very interesting. The surest way to an intellectual’s heart is though his ego. This young lady will doubtless go far in life. She then asked why I was spending so much of my time on the mixed bag of losers and cretins who are the modern Conservative Party? Why not turn my attentions to the Liberal Democrats? These at least were already social liberals, and they might with a fraction of the effort I had wasted on the Tories come to some agreement on economic liberalism. Good question, and I had no ready answer. Perhaps I should think of one.
Yes do, Sean. I for one would love to hear it.
In this connection, our American readers in particular would surely appreciate some explanation of the parlous state that Britain’s Conservatives now find themselves in, especially when you consider how well the Republicans are now doing over there. Why is the political right that in such a mess here, while it is the left that is in trouble in the USA? I hope to offer a few answers to this question in a future Samizdata posting, but I have learned from bitter experience over the decades that what I say that I hope to do, and what I do do, are two things that often diverge with embarrassing completeness. So expect that when you read it and no sooner.
I cannot even hope to offer much on the subject of the Lib Dems, the young lady’s proposed alternative focus of Sean Gabb’s attention. Recently someone told me that there are clever young people in their ranks who are not completely indifferent to the claims of economic liberalism. Until then I despised the Liberal Democrats utterly, and had as little to do with them, and even with thinking about them, as I could contrive. But maybe they might make something approximating to libertarians some time reasonably soon. They’re already very sound about cannabis. And they are descended from the nineteenth century Liberal Party of William Gladstone. In the 1950s there were still old-fashioned Liberals like Jo Grimmond to be found among them, before they succumbed to the statism Mark 2 posture that they have adopted for the last forty years or so. Comments anybody?
Sean Gabb will tonight be speaking at a debate – “This House Believes Promoting Diversity Causes Discrimination” is what he will be arguing – organised by the Local Government Association. (Sorry, I realise now that he didn’t say where this would be.) He has been circulating the proposed text of his speech to other Libertarian Alliance people, and I can therefore (and with his permission, given by phone this afternoon) tell you the kind of thing he’ll be saying:
I will begin by questioning the notion of diversity. What does it mean? As commonly used, it means that we should work for the sort of society in which every organisation, public and private, is filled with representative numbers of women, black people, homosexuals, and the handicapped. Anything with less than representative numbers of these and other groups is to be investigated on the grounds that it is probably discriminating. In describing the ideal society according to this view of diversity, the old sneer about jobs for black, one-legged lesbians is not that unfair.
Now, this is a diversity of sorts. But it is not the diversity that really exists when not as carefully managed and constrained as a bonsai tree. This is the diversity that concentrates on superficial differences between individuals. When it comes to matters of opinion, there is no diversity. Everyone is expected – in public, at least – to endorse the kind of opinions that would not be out of place in a Guardian editorial. Let there be diversity of belief – let someone say the number of black people in this country has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished; or that America is the Great Satan, and got a jolly good hiding in New York last year, and should mind its ps and qs over the Middle East in future if it wants to avoid more of the same; or that homosexuals are the spawn of Satan, and aids is only the beginning of God’s punishment for their abominations – let anyone deviate from the Guardian line on any issue dear to the promoters of diversity, and there is an end of talk about diversity. The cry will go up for sackings from employment, for police and security service harassment, and of course for censorship laws with criminal sanctions attached. Promoters of diversity as the word is commonly used are inclined to tolerate only the diversity of which they approve. Where they do not approve, they will happily manufacture excuses for hate crime laws as arbitrary and soon perhaps as draconian as the religious laws of Elizabeth I.
That, I suspect, is the diversity promoted by the Local Government Association. …
Sean tells me that he intends soon to write a report of how this all went, in his Free Life Commentaries series, hopefully tomorrow. → Continue reading: An Old Whig in action – and perhaps a new blogger
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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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