Under comment pressure from the deeply annoying A_t, and before he says it for me, I realise that “witchfinding” or “witchhunting” are no more appropriate as descriptions of what happened to Harry Stein than they are of what happened during the 1950s when McCarthy was chasing communists. Communists existed. Witches did not exist. But racists also exist. It’s merely that Harry Stein isn’t one. Oh well.
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Here’s a meme (“a pack not a herd”) that I’d like to see run wild. And allow me also to refer back to this and to this, a single piece by me in two fragments from the Samizdata archives (from before we had the “MORE” routine in place). Says Glenn Reynolds (for it is he):
In other words and to extrapolate the principle only somewhat, what if security, catching bad guys, the very law itself maybe, turn out to be like the economy? What if, like the economy, the criminal justice system (and most certainly the criminal detection system) can’t be or – more modestly – works far better when not centrally planned? Oh sure, there’d be a mass of “waste and duplication of effort” in a free market in public safety, just as there is now in the electric kettle industry. But good electric kettles are not now hard to find, the way they would be in a world run by the likes of the F(ederal) B(ureau of electric) K(ettles). So … October 31st, 2002 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I don’t know – I really do not know – how much clout little old limey Samizdata has in the big wide world out there, by which I mean the USA, but I hope it has some, and that if we flag up this article in City Journal (Autumn 2002), then it will count for a little something, or at any rate an extra little something to set beside the fact that Instapundit has already flagged it up a few hours ago. Maybe it will influence these particular PC witchfinders that they are now getting themselves detectably, internet searchably, despised all over the world (by which I mean in Britain). The author of the article is a new name to me, Harry Stein. Stein is the author of the book How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace), and the article is about his trials and tribulations on the road selling his book, and specifically about a speech he gave in Dallas and its gutter-journalistic aftermath. Perry likes quotes so that this will make sense even if the link one day goes dead, so let me see. Well, here’s quite a lot of the piece, but it’s a good piece, so …: → Continue reading: Witchfinding in Dallas October 30th, 2002 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Everything I ever say about blogging, the internet, emails, email chatrooms, etc., has to be prefaced by the caveat that I’m a ludicrously late comer to all this stuff, and what do I really know? But one thing I do know is that I prefer being a blogger to being an emailer in an email chatroom. The thing I hate about “chat” rooms is how you seem to get these constant eruptions of abuse. It’s like being a rat in one of those horrible experiments which prove that rats can’t live like that. Every so often fights break out and with every fight that’s fought more fur falls out, more immune system damage is suffered, more rats abandon procreation as a life goal, and each rat is one fight nearer to just laying down and dying of a broken heart at the sheer horribleness of it all. Blogging often gets frisky, especially in the comments sections (which seem to me to be a lot like the nicest of the chatrooms) but basically, I’m convinced, blogging is not like that. → Continue reading: Ratmailing versus blogging October 29th, 2002 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
About a week ago I posted a brand-X piece about armed citizenry (wisdom and virtue of), but included a not quite brand-X question: does anyone know of any website/blog/compendium of links to individual stories of guns used successfully for self-defence? There were a few comments, including this from themic:
To my shame I didn’t email any encouragement back to him, and that was that, until today, when themic came back with a further comment:
I share these doubts, which is why I’ve rescued the comment and its link from the oblivion of being attached to a week-old posting and put it here. Changing the subject somewhat, on his own blog themic also supplies a link to this – as he rightly calls it – creepy website, that backs up that creepy poster first encountered and photographed by Perry, and copied ever since by bloggers everywhere. UPDATE. Quote from keepandbeararms.com:
That’s exactly what I was asking someone to be doing. (How nice it would be if some Americans actually heard about this site for the first time from here. Usually all the information and explanation flows in the other direction.) October 29th, 2002 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
The world knows it as Silicon Valley, a name coined in 1971 by the editor of a microelectronics newsletter; but on the Rand McNally Atlas it is the Santa Clara Valley, a 40-mile by 10-mile strip running from Palo Alto to the southern suburbs of San Jose, at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area. It constitutes just over one-third of the 1312-square-mile Santa Clara County. In 1950 it was the prune capital of America.
October 25th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Thanks to Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas for the link to this, which says that peace may have broken out between India and Pakistan. They aren’t yet talking to each other about it, but touch wood, for the time being, they’re doing it.
I seem to recall not a disagreement exactly, more like a friendly exchange of his fears and of my hopes which both of us shared – “I hope I’m wrong”, “I hope I’m right”, that kind of stuff – between me and David Carr about India and Pakistan. The trouble with predicting peace and of then getting (a little slice of) it is that peace isn’t very newsworthy. War, on the other hand, gets absolutely everyone who ever told us so saying I told you so. So anyway, I told you so. Cue a nuclear attack by India. The Indians were withdrawing their forces because they didn’t want to bomb them. No, please, no. October 25th, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
I seem to recall some mention here of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Yes, here, in the comments. All who seek a painless way of learning a little more about this truly great man, and also about a rather interesting British broadcaster whom not all Samizdata readers will know much about, should read this Patrick Crozier piece for Biased BBC, which proves that Biased BBC is not itself nearly so biased as you might expect it to be. (Once again the blogger archive system is a deranged mess which blanks out the very piece you are trying to get to. All must move from Blogger to Movable Type. All, I say, all. So go to the top and scroll down to Wed Oct 23.) Patrick begins thus:
And I love this, towards the end of Patrick’s piece, about the end of Clarkson’s performance:
As I recall it Puck said he’d put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes, and I don’t remember Brunel ever launching a satellite into earth orbit. But had he been around now he undoubtedly would have. Jeremy Clarkson, for the benefit of all you Americans, is a somewhat facetious but otherwise very capable, confident and good-humoured writer and TV broadcaster, mostly on the subject of cars. Politically Clarkson is a P. J. O’Rourke party-on libbo-rightie – O’Rourke also got a lot of his first writing assignments doing cars did he not? – and is definitely one of us. He gets right up the noses of all those whose noses we here want got up, so it’s very good news that Patrick reckons he did so well. All of this is in connection with a BBC search to find “the greatest Briton”, and you never know, Brunel might do quite well. Princess bloody Diana indeed. October 25th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The buzz started by the Two Blowhards about whether righties like art or not, etc., rumbles on most entertainingly. I particularly liked this posting. Here’s a few more pennies-worth from me. If you are a lefty, you believe in actively shaping the details of the big wide world out there. You and your friends are going to plan it, shape it, sculpt it, collectively and democratically if you are being nice about it. Therefore your opinions about everything, including art, are a public issue. If you prefer abstract impressionism to neo-realism, then you have a positive duty to say so, because when you have finally become the Benevolent Despot of Everything of Behalf of Everyone, your opinion is going to make a big difference to all those favoured or thwarted artists and art fans out there. Ditto your opinions about history, geography, biology, nuclear physics, literary criticism, sport, car design or car abolition, Linux-v-Windows-v-Mac, gay marriage, tupperware, who should or should not get the Nobel Peace Prize and who should or should not be allowed to enter the Eurovision Song Contest. And when you finally realise that you aren’t going to be the Benevolent Despot of Everything on Behalf of Everyone, there remains the matter of badgering the person who is into giving political support to the art you approve of, and to everything else that you approve of, and dissing everything you want dissed. There are no boundaries to politics. Everything is political. Even the personal – in fact especially the personal, because that makes this quintessentially leftist point so strongly – is political. And then there’s the right, by which I mean me. Actually I don’t care for the word “right” to describe my noble and infinitely nuanced self, for all the usual libertarian reasons. Legalise drugs, hurrah for the international free migration of labour, blah blah blah. But the word refuses to detach itself from me. So yes, the Other Position I contrast with leftism is my own. → Continue reading: Art to the left – art to the right October 25th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Thank God Stalin antedated Photoshop. October 24th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
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.) October 23rd, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. October 23rd, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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