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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Most people in the UK, and many abroad, are familiar with the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian who was shot dead by Metropolitan police as a suspected suicide bomber on 22nd July, 2005. The latest in this saga is that the shooting was ruled a breach health and safety laws.
Well, okay, I am fairly sure that Jean Charles de Menezes would have felt his health and safety were not well served by the people who shot him dead. But surely coming to that conclusion cannot have taken more than two years of deliberation. The Met screwed up big time and killed an innocent man in a horrific way, that was clear fairly soon after the event.
But at the risk of seeming heartless, mistakes happen. I am not saying the Met should not be raked over the coals for this horrendous error (indeed they should be), but one can still take the view that the principle of shooting dead suicide bombers who are in public places is still a rather good one, just so long as the people doing the shooting have a bloody good reason to think the people they shoot are indeed suicide bombers. That is not a casual qualification of principle… if the decision-making processes used by the Met to make such calls is always likely to be as defective as it demonstrably was on 22nd July, 2005, then we need to be convinced that this is no longer the case if we are to ever trust the police to make that sort of decision again.
But that is a fairly straightforward managerial question… it seems to me that the real issue that needs to be settled is not ‘did the police screw up’ (clearly they did) but rather was the police’s response to its dreadful mistake criminal?
We were fed a stream of completely baseless lies in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Jean Charles de Menezes looked middle eastern (he did not), he was wearing an unseasonable padded coat that could have hidden a bomb (he was not), we was running towards the train (he was not), he ran when challenged by armed police (he did not), he jumped over the turnstile (in fact he used his god damned travel card)… The CCTV footage? It was not turned on. And then it was but it did not record. And then it cannot be found. Lie after lie after lie.
The real questions which need to be answered are not “were the health and safety laws violated?”… An innocent man was shot in the head seven times by the police for Christ’s sake! Of course it was a mistake, no one thinks the police intentionally shot the wrong man just for the hell of it. The question is, why are the people who then tried to cover it up not looking AT THE VERY LEAST at the end of their careers and more reasonably, prosecution for conspiring to pervert the course of justice? What were the names of the people behind each of those falsehoods? Presumably the people who said those things are still working for the Met. Otherwise what? Did journalists just invent those claims? I would really like to know. I have watched the coverage waiting for these things to be asked and not seen anything along those lines. Instead, we hear about ‘health and safety laws’. Amazing.
Mistakes happen and that is tragic. But if the police (who exactly?) then try to cover that fact up, lethal mistakes will continue to happen, which is a catastrophe.
That is the real issue.
I was watching the Channel 4 news coverage of the state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to Britain, when something I saw nearly made me fall off my chair laughing.
So what does the British Army band for the guard of honour strike up as The Man himself steps out of his limo to high-five Her Majesty?
The Darth Vader March from Star Wars (click on ‘watch the report’ to see for yourself). I kid you not.
Someone somewhere deserves a medal.
For those who are inexplicably worried about Russia’s alleged ‘resurgence’ as a major world power now that it’s economy is about the size of Italy’s economy (albeit far less diversified), the following article should be unalloyed good news:
In the Russian Federation, a country where hundreds of companies are launched every year, the plans to create yet another one would not be particularly noteworthy. Except that Russian Technologies is to be very different from most of the rest. It will be no capitalist venture conceived by a profit-seeking entrepreneur, but a corporation established by a decree of the Russian Parliament. A giant conglomerate with the state apparatus behind it, its official mandate will be to ‘develop Russia’s heavy industry.’
The ‘money quote’ being “with the state apparatus behind it”…presumably because it was proven that “state apparatus” was the key to how the Soviets developed technology and business methods far superior to those in the capitalist west, became fabulously wealthy and as a result won the Cold War and… oh, hang on… In other words, the clowns who run the Kremlin are going to try an approach used in the West in the 1960s and 1970’s of creating large bureaucratic ‘national champions’. And that is because that worked soooo well for us, right?
So clearly those who feel “something must be done about resurgent Russia” can now relax and just let nature take its course. Putin and his entourage of economic ignoramuses are screwing Russia and crippling its ability to ever develop a dynamic market economy. This will weaken the nation far more effectively than anything anyone else could do to them. I just happen to think it is a pathetic waste of people’s talents and potential.
Over on The First Post, Richard Ehrman has written an article called Immigration: Britain’s wake-up call that gives us a splendid example of how the left and right generally share ‘meta-context’ (the unspoken axioms that we take for granted when we discuss something):
The new population projections are shocking […] Over the next 25 years, the Office of National Statistics expects the British population to rise to 71million, from 60m today. After that, it is on course to hit 75m by mid-century. […] And because we are not producing enough children to replace ourselves, most of this dramatic growth will be due to immigration. […] Population projections have proved wildly out in the past, so this latest version should be taken with a pinch of salt. But it should serve as a wake-up call, too.
If we are going to rely on immigrants to pay our pensions and do the jobs we don’t want to do, we are also going to have to build an awful lot of new houses, roads, schools and hospitals to accommodate them.
The fact the population is growing in Britain is shocking, apparently. Okay, yet for some reason I am not shocked. However why is this something we should regard as a “wake up call”? Personally I am hearing something more like a dinner bell being rung. Richard Ehrman is associated with Politeia, an allegedly market-friendly think tank, so why should ‘we’, by which I very strongly suspect he means ‘we-as-taxpayers’, be building houses, roads, schools and hospitals for anyone? In less benighted times the arrival of more people would have been referred to as a ‘growing market’ (i.e. a good thing) rather than an impending liability which needs a “wake-up call” to alert us to a problem.
Let me quote something very germane that was uttered yesterday at the Libertarian Alliance conference in London, by Shane Frith of Progressive Vision on more or less the same subject:
“The claim that immigration puts strain on ‘vital public services’ is a myth. The reality is that immigration only puts ‘pressure’ on the inefficient state sector such as state schools and NHS hospitals. Vital public services provided by the private sector welcome the additional customers. In the vital field of food supply, you don’t hear Tesco complaining that they hadn’t planned on the increased business – we face no food shortages. Neither does Vodafone struggle with the technical demands of providing mobile phones to all these immigrants. Immigration merely highlights the existing failure of the inefficient, unreformed state sector.”
Quite! If indeed much of Central Europe is decamping from their homelands and heading for this Sceptred Isle, what an excellent time to abolish the decrepit socialist legacy systems (which are rather like running 1980’s era computers in 2007 and then wondering why things do not work) that have inexplicably survived into the Twenty First century. Time to replace them with adaptive market driven approaches that are neither distorted nor crowded out by an idiotic and fantastically inefficient state run medical system, preposterous public sector housing and ever more dumbed down state schools. None of these things, not one, is logically something the state should have anything to do with. As I have argued before, perhaps the changing demographic realities may force exactly the sort of changes that should have been introduced decades ago.
And if that is true, it is yet another reason to thank the latest wave of immigrants. Guys, you might actually save us from ourselves.
Vitajte v Londyne!
I have argued in the past that violent repression, gulags and mass murder are not in fact the defining characteristics for a state to be ‘totalitarian’. The defining characteristic is, as the word itself suggests, that control over people be pervasive and total… mass murderousness, goose-stepping troops, waving red (or whatever) flags are merely an incidental consequence and which can be better described in other ways (such as ‘tyrannical, murderous, dictatorial, brutal, national socialist, communist, islamo-fascist etc.).
As a result my view is that we in the west are already well on the way to a new form of post-modern totalitarian state (what Guy Herbert calls ‘soft fascism’) in which behaviour and opinions which are disapproved of by the political class are pathologised and then regulated by violence backed laws “for your own good” or “for the children” or “for the environment”.
And so we have force backed regulations setting out the minutia of a parent’s interactions with their own children, vast reams on what sort of speech or expression is and is not permitted in a workplace, rules forbidding a property owner allowing consenting adults from smoking in a place of business, what sorts of insults are permitted, rules covering almost every significant aspect of how you can or cannot build or modify your own house on your own property, moves to restrict what sort of foods can be sold, what kind of light bulbs are allowed, and the latest one, a move to require smokers to have a ‘licence to smoke‘. Every aspect of self-ownership is being removed and non-compliance criminalised and/or pathologised.
The person suggesting this latest delightfully totalitarian brick-in-the-wall, Professor Julian le Grand, says some very telling things:
“There is nothing evil about smoking as long as you are just hurting yourself. We have to try to help people stop smoking without encroaching on people’s liberties.” […] But he said requiring them to fill in forms, have photographs taken in order to apply for a permit would prove a more effective deterrent.
No doubt Julian le Grand thinks that makes him seem reasonable and sensible, because he does not want people to have their civil liberties encroached upon… and he then proceeds to describe how he would like to do precisely that in order to ‘deter’ you from doing what you really wanted to do.
The reason for this seemingly strange approach is simple to understand because to the totalitarian, something does not have to be ‘evil’ to warrant the use of force to discourage it, you merely have to have (a) coercive power (b) disapprove of another person’s choices regarding their own life. That is all the justification you need, simply the fact other people are not living the way you think they should, in your presumably infinite wisdom.
Notice how coercive actions imposed by state power are described as ‘helping’. We will force you to pay more, force you to go to a doctor…but we will throw your arse in gaol if you dare try to circumvent our unasked for ‘help’.
The ‘paleo-totalitarian’ simply uses force if you disobey, no messing about… however the post-modern totalitarian prefers to add a morally insulating intermediate step that allows his kind to talk about ‘civil liberties’: first he gives you a nice regulation to obey and only if you dare not comply with that do the Boys in Blue get sent to show you the error of your ways.
I can think of quite a few ways I would rather like to ‘help’ Julian le Grand and his ilk in order to mitigate their pathological need to interfere with other people’s lives. All for the greater good of society, you understand.
I was going to write the following comment on a blog article written back in 2005 by a US Muslim political activist who is calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution:
I would like to thank you for writing this article.
Having a Muslim political activist call for American civilians to be disarmed in their own country is just about the best politically supercharged endorsement for civilian gun ownership I can imagine. If the NRA was paying you to write this, it was money well spent (that is just rhetorical of course, I am sure they did not and you probably actually believe what you are saying). Please, keep writing more along this line!
But I decided not to. There is a well known axiom: “Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake”
I hope he is still writing such articles.
As you might have noticed, the Samizdata server crapped out in a major way… and just to make it menthol, we also lost all our back-ups after 24th September (quite how that happened is still a bit unclear).
Well at least I had a separate set of back-ups also made by someone else, so no problem, thinks I… so imagine my happiness when I discover that the back-up back-up server crapped out some time ago and we were not in fact being backed up. That would have been nice to know.
I will be manually reconstructing the posts as best I can from the full RSS feeds.
Oh joy.
Needless to say I shall be setting up some sort of full site backup myself now.
One of the best debunkers of lazy, collectivist economic thinking is the blogger Tim Worstall, who lives in the sunny climes of Portugal. His take-down of Polly Toynbee is just too good to miss. I particularly cannot help noticing the point about Sweden; the country, often held up as a model of social democratic goodness, is in fact moving in liberal directions in areas like education (vouchers), although it remains shockingly heavily taxed.
The BBC is reporting one of the most grotesque things I have seen for a while…
Individuals can no longer be held responsible for obesity so government must act to stop Britain “sleepwalking” into a crisis, a report has concluded.
So, you are not responsible for what you stick in your own damned mouth. Think about that and the implications that pulse out of those words like a neutron bomb’s radiation.
I have long said that in the western world the fascist approach to control (you may ‘own’ the means of production but you must used them in accordance with national political directives, i.e you are completely regulated and thus have liability without control) has completely triumphed over the socialist approach to control (the state, euphemised as ‘The People’, directly owns everything and you are simply a politically directed deployable unit of labour). And of course ‘labour’ means you and what you do with your body. This particular means of production is already only ‘owned’ by you provided you use it in a politically approved manner. And that will soon include what you may eat or may not eat.
This BBC article makes me wonder if the time to start throwing rocks could be closer than we like to think.
As I have had several people ask, I have set up a Samizdata Facebook group.
Now all I have to do if figure out what to do with it as I am new to Facebook.
I make no secret of my boundless admiration for Ayaan Hirsi Ali and so let me strongly commend an article in the International Herald Tribune called A refugee from Western Europe by Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie (the later of whom I confess I may have judged too harshly in the past).
It is important to realize that Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society, and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.
Having recapitulated the Enlightenment for herself in a few short years, Hirsi Ali has surveyed every inch of the path leading out of the moral and intellectual wasteland that is traditional Islam. She has written two luminous books describing her journey, the most recent of which, “Infidel,” has been an international bestseller for months. It is difficult to exaggerate her courage. As Christopher Caldwell wrote in The New York Times, “Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him.”
“There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice”… truly words worth burning into one’s soul.
Given the craven dishonour of the Dutch government, whose promises to protect her wherever she went have proven to be worthless (as indeed the people of Srebenica discovered in 1995), if anyone knows if someone has organised a place for donations to pay for her security from the fanatical vermin who wish to silence her, I for one am certainly willing to put my money where my mouth is.
The postal strike in Britain would seem like the perfect opportunity to not privatise the Royal Mail but to acknowledge that in an era of competing global courier companies and e-mail, there is no long any need for the state to have a ‘national’ postal service at all.
As Dave Cameron never misses the opportunity to miss an opportunity, I do not suppose we will be hearing this from the Conservative Party any time soon then, eh?
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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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