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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Lasers for shooting down mortars bombs and missiles… sounds great and has potential to change battlefield quite fundamentally… if it actually works in practice out in the messy real world. Remember Patriot? Much cheered at the time but it turned out to be a wildly expensive but only occasionally effective weapon system designed to shoot down rather cheap and only occasionally effective Scuds.
I suppose it all comes down to it is this another a vastly costly to operate system designed to shoot down various cheap-as-chips weapon systems? I suppose time will tell because potentially this is revolutionary as battlefield lasers could eventually mean the end of a great many forms of indirect weapons. Potentially.
Daniel Hannan has a short but pointed article about how the European Parliament does not hesitate to ignore its own rules if it means they can crush euro-sceptic dissent.
The European Parliament operates a corporatist system: in order to move amendments, propose debates or qualify for campaign finance, MEPs are required to join trans-national Groups. To incorporate such a Group, you need at least 20 Euro-MPs from five states. This means that, alongside the big Groups – the Christian Democrats, Liberals, Socialists, Communists and Greens – there is also a little bloc of Euro-sceptics called Independence and Democracy. There was also, briefly, a Euro-fascist alliance (erroneously termed “far Right”), which fell apart because its block-headed members couldn’t stand one another.
The new rules, drawn up by the Labour MEP (and touchy blogger) Richard Corbett, would raise the thresholds to 25 MEPs and seven states, making it harder for dissidents to register. What are they so scared of, these Euro-fanatics? After all, we sceptics represent no more than 50 or 60 MEPs out of 785. Why not treat us as an Official Opposition, thereby demonstrating their fair-mindedness and bestowing a measure of legitimacy on their institution? Because they can’t bring themselves to do it. They hate us too much.
Disgraceful but hardly surprising.
Neil Glass, who writes under the pen name David Craig, is to run against David Davies with these immortal words:
My message is that the 42 days issue is not important to most people as we are unlikely to be affected by it. However, living on the national average salary as I do, I believe that what is important to taxpayers is how MPs have become overpaid, out of touch and are wasting billions of pounds of our money when the cost of living is spiraling out of control.”
So other people’s liberty, meh, who cares about such trifles? All that matters to Neil Glass is having money wasted. Truly here we have an unabashedly amoral man …who will feel right at home in politics. The fact he would give half him MP pay if he won (which he won’t) to charity is a political device, nothing more. This is not a person I would care to shake hands with, to put it mildly, as by doing this he is overtly running against civil liberties.
…there is a party celebrating a half century (not out), at Samizdata HQ tonight.
The company was delightful…
…the booze plentiful…
…the gifts were exceedingly creative
Or perhaps a ‘stupidity’ of congressmen? A ‘fantasy’ of lawmakers? An ‘arrogance’ of representatives? They all seem to fit.
The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure. The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.
The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.
The US House of Representatives have just in effect declared that all foreign governments and businesses must be subject to the wishes of US politicians and their regulations and sell oil at prices that US legislators like. Or else. The sheer absurdity of this is breathtaking. Exactly what sanction were they planning against OPEC? Perhaps not buying their fungible oil? Yeah, that will do the trick.
It is hard not to be struck by how often the British state threatens its subjects. You can hardly turn on the television without being confronted by direct unambiguous threats that say ‘obey-or-else’, as mention here on Samizdata before recently. Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute wrote about this in an article titled Watch out, the Gestapo are about.
The latest one I have noticed is a threat to car owners. If they do not pay their car tax, they will have their cars seized and crushed (cheers to Andy H for the link to the advert).
Imagine hearing this on your television, set to ominous music:
We are the MasterCard Credit card Company and we have lent you money…
If you don’t pay it back, we will send the bailiffs around and seize your property!
Of course MasterCard only lend money to people who are willing to take that money in the first place, yet can you imagine the howls of outrage if a company publicly threatened people if they do not comply with the terms and conditions of a loan? Of course no company in their right mind would actually do that.
Yet do you hear any outrage from the Conservative Party or the LibDems when the state uses tax money to run advertisements threatening to use the Boys in Blue against people who do not cough up the money the state wants? Not that I have heard.
Well I am not outraged either, in fact I am delighted. Every time I see the TV Licensing adverts or the Car Tax adverts, I am struck by their educational value. States are self-perpetuating institutions through which the means of collective coercion are applied, nothing more or less, and having the state be completely upfront about its true nature is very useful indeed. One of Samizdata’s tag lines is ‘The State is not your friend’, so I can hardly complain when the state starts running advertisements saying much the same thing.
Finding myself uncharacteristically unable to give a flying fuck about what is in the news today and therefore unable to murder helpless pixels merely to write about politics or world events, I took advantage of my inamorata being away on business to escape the Ivory Tower and go bathe in the blood and beer of popular culture… yes, I just saw Doomsday, a post-Apocalypse Mad Max-meets-28 Days Later action splatter flick.
It is a movie that sets its sights low and consistently hits the target. Okay it does get a bit wobbly when any character has to speak for more than fifteen seconds, which thankfully occurs rarely. That said, much as I enjoyed this exceedingly low-brow gore-fest, Rhona Mitra is simply better than the movie. She is superb as the quipping but mostly taciturn harder-than-nails action chick with the one thing so many action heroines lack: physical presence. Also this movie has the best and most brutally ended action-girl-on-action-girl fight scene, well, quite possibly ever.
And the ‘eye thing’… very cool.
But I am not writing this to praise Rhona… well, actually I am…
…no…no… the purpose was to repeat what an old Scottish chum of mine said to me on the phone this evening when he unexpectedly called me up and I told him I had seen Doomsday.
“Oh yes, that film is a hoot!” he replied, “but it just made me wonder, maybe the Apocalypse is just Glasgow at chucking out time on a Friday evening, only it never ends. And people who can eat deep fried Mars Bars will eat anything.”
Gordon Ramsay, the ‘outspoken’ celeb chief wants the state to outlaw out-of-season vegetables. I kid you not. That the man is an arrogant little shit has always been apparent from his TV shows but this sort of national socialist volkish crap really does mark him as truly authoritarian.
The TV chef said it was “fundamentally important” for chefs to provide locally-sourced food. “Fruit and veg should be seasonal,” he said. “Chefs should be fined if they haven’t got ingredients in season on their menu. I don’t want to see asparagus on in the middle of December. I don’t want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home grown.”
The ‘I am’ does not want to see something and so thinks his views should be the force backed law of the land: the psychopathology of the expert that we so often see coming from doctors is at work again. The great unwashed must be forced to follow expert opinion, which means their opinion, naturally.
I like the idea of third world farmers pulling themselves out of poverty and selling me their products whenever I want to buy them and why should a loud mouthed self important chief and a bunch of fascistic green activists get to have a say in that? Their craving to impose their will on others should stop being socially acceptable and they need to be called authoritarian thugs to their faces.
Christopher Booker has a great article in the Telegraph titled Watch the web for climate change truths, which shows that The One True Faith of Anthropogenic Global Warming, having used the internet to preach their gospel, are going to have a hard time suppressing global warming non-conformists using the ‘net to do the same.
Last November, viewing photographs of a snowless Snowdon at an exhibition in Cardiff, the Welsh environment minister, Jane Davidson, said “we must act now to reduce the greenhouse gases that cause climate change”. Yet virtually no coverage has been given to the abnormally deep spring snow which prevented the completion of a new building on Snowdon’s summit for more than a month, and nearly made it miss the deadline for £4.2 million of EU funding.
[…]
On April 24 the World Wildife Fund (WWF), another body keen to keep the warmist flag flying, published a study warning that Arctic sea ice was melting so fast that it may soon reach a “tipping point” where “irreversible change” takes place. This was based on last September’s data, showing ice cover having shrunk over six months from 13 million square kilometres to just 3 million. What the WWF omitted to mention was that by March the ice had recovered to 14 million sq km (see the website Cryosphere Today), and that ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska that month was at its highest level ever recorded
So not such a bad time to be a polar bear after all. It is also nice to see in-article out-linking to a source on a newspaper site.
Also Daniel Hannan has a Telegraph blog article called How bad does the UN have to get? which presents the difference between the ideals and reality of that vast organisation, mentioning ivory poaching, the Iraq food-for-oil scandal, the betrayal of Bosnian Muslims massacred in Srebrenica and the appalling UN role in the Rwanda genocide. However the most interesting part for me was in the comments, a defender of the UN replied thusly:
I don’t think you have bothered to give us enough information regarding the various allegations you have made about the UN.
There isn’t enough information on the Bosnian Muslims being betrayed for any of us, lefties or righties, to make a reasonable assessment. Where in the chain of command did this betrayal happen? What, exactly, was the UN betrayal of these Muslims? What else was the UN doing in Bosnia and in regard to Bosnia at the same time, so that we can come to some opinion as to whether what happened in Srebrenica was a small part or a large part of the total UN activities there in that region?
Was the oil-for-food scam [in Iraq] the activity of a small group of UN employees or was it what all UN staff were engaged in directly or indirectly? We don’t know because you haven’t told us! Was the UN institutionally guilty right through all its employees for the oil-for-food scam or was it down to a few individuals, whom the UN may have disciplined in some way by now? You didn’t tell us!
What were the UN reasons for not seizing the arms caches [in Rwanda]? We need to know! Did they make a mistake in not realising that the genocide would follow? A mistake is not corruption nor is it a failure to deliver overall.
So we need more information before rushing to judgement. That is a very representative defence of the UN of the sort I have heard for years. It is the equivalent of the time hallowed tactic of a UK minister responding to embarrassing questions by saying “we must hold an enquiry before rushing to judgement” in the knowledge that by the time the enquiry gets under way, said embarrassing news will be months or even years in the past and the the headlines have vanished down the memory hole, allowing harsh reality to be safely reinterpreted into something more ‘nuanced’ and the gravy trains will still keep running along their well polished rails undisturbed… except in the cases of Srebrenica, Food-for-Oil and Rwanda, the nasty truths are very well documented and understood. All this is only ten seconds of typing and click of the Google button away.
The internet really does change almost everything.
… to be in government. Making the country a ‘better place’ comes a distant second.
Alex Singleton (of this parish) has an article up on Brassneck titled Hugo Chavez is blinded by ideology. He points out the foolishness of Hugo Chavez’s ‘concerns’ about a small British owned cocoa estate in Venezuela, given that a nationalised estate is highly unlikely to be able to reproduce the alleged high quality of Willie Harcourt-Cooze’s operation.
But that presupposes that Hugo Chavez gives a damn about the economic consequences of his actions. I think he is far from ‘blind’ to the implication of his policies, more likely he simply does not see them as particularly relevant to politics… and everything Chavez does is about politics. The only real reason that a small British owned operation would attract the attention of someone like ‘El Duce’ is he sees political benefit in being seen to move against a ‘foreign’ business, never mind how many locals it employs or what local goods and services the business uses. It is important to remember that his power base is motivated primarily by envy and not by their own wealth directly, or lack thereof.
In other words, the sort of people in Venezuela who support a demagogic national socialist like Chavez would react well to sticking it to a Brit and the net economic weal of the nation has very little to do with it. Chavez is the government and getting people to support the government is all that matters to a creature like him. And as that is what his supporters want, if such an approach writ large destroys the Venezuelan economy, people are only getting exactly what they voted for. Personally I think his supporters deserve every day they live in abject poverty, something that will continue for the foreseeable future under their government of choice… pity about the rest however.
Granted I am somewhat indifferent to democracy, seeing it as nothing more than a tool for securing limited government (at best) or a mechanism for legitimising proxy theft (at worst), but as so many leftists make such a song and dance about the importance of democracy, it is remarkable to see people like Mexican Hugo Chavez wannabe Lopez Obrador casting it aside when he does not like the way it is headed. His supporters simply seized control of the chambers of both houses of Congress back on 10th April so that they could block government proposals to ease restrictions on private investment in the state oil industry. Obrador does not like the fact he cannot democratically get the results he wants, so he just stops debate on the subject in congress completely. Fair enough. If I was the Mexican government, I would just start ruling by edict until the democratic institutions become functional again, or failing that, just send in the riot cops with instructions to bust some heads to remove some political trespassers.
People opposed to Obrador have made a very effective advertisement likening him to sundry totalitarian thugs. However Obrador has demanded this advertisement be ordered off the air by Mexico’s federal electoral authority, indicating as well as disliking democratic processes he cannot control, he also does not believe in freedom of expression. Quelle surprise.
Well due to the magic of the internet… here it is.
Cool.
The UK government has been peddling a culture of fear since 9/11 as an excuse for ever more control over people’s lives. Strange how people in Britain managed to survive all those years of Irish terrorism without such madness. To see how successful they have been at making this psychosis a pervasive feature of British life, check this out.
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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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