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.
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Bravo to the security men aboard the MV Maersk Alabama, who when approached and fired on by Somali pirates, fired back and drove them off.
Placing armed security men aboard ships vulnerable to pirate attacks has always been the obvious solution to the problem of piracy. How could anyone have thought that hugely expensive warships designed for real wars, operating under preposterous rules of engagement, was ever the solution to a profusion of scabby predators with small arms zooming about in small fast boats worth a few thousand dollars at most? There simply is no excuse for this having taken so long to implement, but kudos to Maersk for doing the right thing… firearms are a great deal better than relying on a hail of beer bottles.
But I would urge Maersk to invest in a pair of .50 cal HMGs per ship to discourage the more redoubtable of the Somali pirates from upping the ante by taking a Dushka off the back of a ‘technical’. An additional advantage of using heavy machineguns is it makes sinking the attacker and hopefully killing the pirates more likely, which can only be beneficial in both thinning out the herd and encouraging these predatory scum to find a less hazardous line of work.
And then there is always this humorous private sector approach… and the funny thing is, it would probably not only work but also be oversubscribed and profitable for a while, at least as long as the supply of ‘big game’ lasts.
The Archbishop of Canterbury seems to be of the view that somewhere in the Bible, it says “take the wealth of others by force and give it to people best able to work the political system”. Just another statist thug, but then we already knew that.
There is a fascinating post on Instapundit about the thinly disguised intention of the Obama administration to purge Republicans from federal government jobs… this is excellent news.
One of the best ways to get the next (eventual) Republican in the White House to support taking an axe to the public sector would be if there are as few Republicans apparatchiks as possible and the civil service is seen as a bastion of the Democratic Party (and thus there are few votes to be lost by bashing them hard and often).
More and faster please, Obama.
Often I read, in various Climate Alarmist articles, words to the effect that “time is running out on a global climate deal“… which is great news if it is actually true. It suggests to me that perhaps they realise that the “universally accepted” One True Apostolic Eco-Faith is really the very epitome of a paper tiger as there is far from a genuine consensus on the subject.
So if time is running out, it would seem hard to overstate the importance of running interference and generally throwing spanners into the works for as long as possible. To prevent the latest transnational ‘tranzi’ red-wrapped-in-green statist power ploys, friends of liberty need to do whatever they can to ‘run out the clock’ and then encourage as much international political recrimination post-failure as possible, in order to keep the ball out of play for as long as possible. I think it is time to suggest creative but practicle ways to help sow discord and disunity amongst the predatory political elites (and their supporters) of the various countries seeking to extend ever more control over their national subjects under the cloak of green politics.
Certainly if overtly totalitarian measures like carbon rationing are ever brought in, truly the time for unambiguous direct resistance to the state will have arrived, so preventing things getting to that stage is more than a little important.
It is the weekend, lighten up
John Bercow is the sort of politician I love: so dependably grasping and filled with a sense of entitlement that, whilst others have the wit to keep their heads down as MP expenses are under increased public scrutiny, good ol’ John just cannot stop himself from noisily grunting and ramming his snout deeper into the taxpayer’s trough.
As I mentioned before, the longer this goes on and the more disrepute it brings upon the entire political class, the happier I am. They just cannot help themselves… I mean what is the point of all the power if you cannot trouser a few poxy quid, eh?
Richard Reeves writes an article in the Telegraph called It’s not about the size of the state – it’s what David Cameron does with it that not only falls at the first fence (the title pretty much alerted me to the fact this was going to be filled ‘advice from the enemy’), it is overflowing with analysis that encapsulates the intellectual failing that underpin BlueLabour. Let me do a fisk-lette:
This week Cameron strayed further still, using the Hugo Young memorial lecture to attack Labour’s record on poverty and inequality. He said that a “re-imagination in the role, as well as size” of the state was needed to build what he called “The Big Society”. It is audacious stuff. Cameron has adopted Labour’s goals of narrowing the gap between rich and poor, reducing child poverty and promoting social mobility, and then damns Labour for failing to achieve them.
What is audacious about conceding the choice of battleground entirely to the nominal enemy? I say ‘nominal’ because in truth the philosophical/ideological differences between New Labour and the Tory Party (BlueLabour) are not that significant.
It is a bit like the ‘audacious’ plans by the allies in World War II to area bomb German cities to break morale by slaughtering enemy workers even though earlier German attempts to do that to Britain had been an abject failure. If “London can take it”, it did not seem to occur to the ‘audacious’ RAF and USAAF that, chances are, Hamburg and Berlin probably can “take it” too.
And so Cameron’s audacious stuff is to try and do what Labour tried, just ‘do it better’. Far from being audacious, this is just more of the same heard-it-all-before by-the-numbers political droning, tailored slightly to appeal to whoever he is talking to at the moment and which way the weathervane is pointing today. Audacious would require an actual meta-contextual shift and Cameron has made it clear he represents continuity, not radical change.
Labour’s response has been to accuse Cameron of advocating “Thatcherism or 19th-century liberalism”. Wrong on both counts. Mrs Thatcher was more likely to join the National Union of Mineworkers than to say, as Cameron did, that “strong and concerted government action” was needed to “remake society.
So if government action (i.e. the welfare state) has hollowed out civil society, it seems remarkable that the notion that more government action might far from “remake society” but rather just continue its unravelling. The brutal truth is that David Cameron (and I suspect Richard Reeves) do not really understand that society may be something governments can weaken and destroy but they is not something that states can “remake” because societies are not “things” in the same way states are, they are emergent collective properties produced by countless several interactions.
But for much of the 20th century, politics was defined by attitudes to the state: the Right against, the Left in favour. And in one area Cameron remains instinctively opposed to state action, which is financial redistribution to reduce poverty. Cameron claims that inequality has worsened under Labour. Actually, the picture is complex: on some measures the gap has narrowed. The fairest assessment is that income inequality today is roughly the same as it was in 1997.
The ‘right’ (a sloppy term really) is against the state? Like Ted Heath maybe? And just how many ‘right’ leaders in the 20th century actually shrunk back the size of the state, as opposed to just growing it a bit more gradually? Never mind that ‘inequality’ per se should not even be an issue (someone else getting richer does not make me poorer), the size of the state is the issue. The larger the state, the more civil society is circumscribed. The larger the state, the more wealth and opportunity is sucked out of productive sectors by confiscation and regulation.
The only think we need more of from government is inaction… we need less across the board, not more… Richard Reeves cannot see that because he is a regulatory statist who sees government in terms of the parties being competing ‘management teams’ rather like Soviet design bureaus… offering creative options within essentially the same ideological system and meta-contextual framework. But in truth we do not need ‘better’ government action, we need ‘less’ government action… dramatically less. We also need actual intellectual opposition, not a difference of management theories. In short we need a far less powerful and intrusive state vis a vis civil society.
It is very much about the size of the state.
Germany is particularly odious when it comes to censorship and allowing legal interference with freedom of expression, but his one takes the biscuit for sheer absurdity…
Some 19 years ago, a man in Germany, together with his half brother, reportedly murdered an actor named Walter Sedlmayr. The man was convicted and served 15 years in jail. Now he is free. And, according to Wired, he has exercised that freedom by instructing lawyers, the elegantly named firm of Stopp and Stopp, to sue Wikipedia.
The lawsuit claims that German privacy law, designed to help criminals re-integrate into society, prevents the man being named in association with Walter Sedlmayr’s murder. Wired quotes Jennifer Granick from the Electronic Frontier Foundation as saying that the lawyers are not only demanding that publications change whatever they write now, but that online archives must endure revision, too.
And just for the record, the people in question who were convicted of murdering Walter Sedlmayr are Wolfgang Wehrle and his half brother Manfred Lauber (just to add yet another place in the google cache where that information can sit). This is wacko enough on its own, but the linked article in turn links to geek.com, quoting the EFF, where they make the much broader point as to why this latest legal excess cannot be tolerated…
As the EFF beautifully puts it: “At stake is the integrity of history itself. If all publications have to abide by the censorship laws of any and every jurisdiction just because they are accessible over the global internet, then we will not be able to believe what we read, whether about Falun Gong (censored by China), the Thai king (censored under lèse majesté) or German murders”.
As the world networks together, increasingly we cannot tolerate legal attacks anywhere because the repercussions will not stay neatly within national borders, so neither can our hostility to such assaults on our liberty… now let us also do something about Britain’s intolerable defamation laws.
A member of the Australian military went missing in the middle of a deadly clash with the Taliban then, fourteen months later, she just wanders back into camp. Is a court martial convened to see if she is guilty of desertion? No, people just shrug their shoulders and start playing tennis with her. What madness is this?
What is the world coming to when a valued member of the armed services takes off under fire and leaves their comrades chasing their tails wondering what happened to her? And it should be noted there were persistent rumours that far from being held captive by the Taliban, she was sniffing around an area of Afghanistan notorious for opium production while her compatriots were risking their lives facing down the enemy. How can this not cause serious repercussions when she wanders back to base after being located by US soldiers (who reportedly said she was a real bitch)? Shocking.
History is an interesting thing, often said to be “written by the winners”… but is it? Certainly in much of Eastern Europe, the end of Communism did not necessarily means the political end of the communists behind the system.
James Mark is a senior lecturer in History at the University of Exeter and he has written a very insightful article on the subject that I commend to all Samizdata.net readers.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
– George Orwell
Yet strangely I do not think Orwell actually knew David Cameron.
This comes as no surprise whatsoever…
All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer’s personal communications, showing who they are contacting, when, where and which websites they are visiting.
Despite widespread opposition over Britain’s growing surveillance society, 653 public bodies will be given access to the confidential information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the Ambulance Service, fire authorities and even prison governors. […] John Yates, Britain’s head of anti-terrorism, has argued that the legislation is vital for his investigators.
The Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner said: “The availability of Communications Data to investigators is absolutely crucial. Its importance to investigating the threat of terrorism and serious crime cannot be overstated”.
It is just a bit ironic that is comes on the day celebrating the Berlin Wall coming down. It is not enough to just defeat this legislation, the likes of John Yates and all his ilk need to be driven from positions of power because these are the Orwellian people who are the true clear and present danger to our very civilisation. The threat from terrorism is real, but the threat from our own insatiable security state is even greater.
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