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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For those unfamiliar with Alisher Usmanov, he is a Soviet era criminal (and I do not mean a dissident) and multi-gazillionare oligarch who is trying to ‘do an Abramovich’ and buy English football club Arsenal. More to the point he is also the man responsible for taking Tim Ireland’s UK based Bloggerheads off-line for pointing out his criminal background (and thereby also taking down Boris Johnson’s blog as ‘collateral damage’ as he was managed by Bloggerheads).
I must confess that I am a couple days late to this fight for the inexcusable reason that I simply cannot abide Tim Ireland, but in truth that has nothing to do with the outrageousness of some jumped up plutocrat throwing his weight around like this. However much I might dislike the notion I am forced to support Tim Ireland unequivocally.
As Mr. Eugenides aptly puts it:
And let’s be clear on this point; these blogs are down not because Usmanov has been libelled, but because he says he’s been libelled, and has a room full of paid monkeys sitting at typewriters firing off threatening letters to that effect.
I don’t give a shit about this character, or Arsenal FC (no offence to any Gooners out there); nor do I share all or even most of Tim Ireland or Craig Murray’s politics. But that’s far from the point. If you can be silenced for calling a businessman a crook, then you can be silenced for calling a politician a crook, too. Then it’s everyone’s problem.
It is for reasons like this that Samizdata is hosted in the USA, where I have no doubt whatsoever that should the likes of Schillings, Alisher Usmanov’s solicitors, approach my hosting company with a demand they pull the plug because I said something mean about some porcine thug-in-a-suit, they would be calmly invited to go get a US court order requiring them to take the site down (good luck with that) and until they do, they should please feel free to go fuck themselves.
The First Amendment to the US Constitution is not the source of any right, it is just a legal tool used by Americans in America to secure the natural right all people have to express themselves. But in this networked world we have, it actually has the unlooked for effect of extending a significant degree of that protection to other people across the world who write from foreign keyboards about foreign things for foreign audiences, hosted on a server in the USA. I find that quite interesting.
There is a strange situation in Louisiana in which absurdly mis-labled ‘civil rights’ protests have been occurring. This has happened because six black students were arrested for seriously assaulting a white student in the aftermath of some nooses being hung suggestively from a tree in order to intimidate black students.
Now correct me if I am wrong but whilst hanging nooses from a tree is a very offensive reference to lynching, unless the owner of the tree objects or someone’s neck is in one of the nooses, dangling some rope from a tree is an act of constitutionally protected freedom of expression, is it not? It may be offensive (like, for example, a rap song extolling the murder of policemen) but it is not actually illegal. Beating a seventeen year old unconscious on the other hand is not constitutionally protected freedom of expression, it is at the very least assault and was initially being treated as attempted murder.
So…
It seems that the ‘civil rights’ protesters feel that if members of the local black community have their sensibilities (quite rightly) upset by the admittedly vile way some teenagers have expressed themselves (namely hanging nooses from a tree), then they should be given the right to assault people they are offended by without charge or indeed any restraint of law.
Presumably these same protesters would also argue that the editors of Jyllands-Posten should be the legitimate targets for violence by any Muslim offended by their provocative use of their right to freedom of expression. Certainly that is what many Muslims were saying about the publishers of the ‘Mohammed cartoons’. The protesters in Louisiana logically must agree with that notion as from what I have read they are not arguing just for broad social opprobrium for the noose-hangers (that is already the case), they are calling for legal sanction against them (just as there were demands for the editors of Jyllands-Posten to be ‘punished’) and some are contributing to the defence costs of the people who beat up the white boy, which presumably means they do not want the black youths who did it punished because being offended makes violence by six (black) teenagers against one (white) teenager perfectly okay.
Is that indeed a fair assessment of what the ‘protesters’ think should be the case, or am I missing something here?
As requested, Samizdata.net now provides a full text XML feed for those who want it.
One hundred and three days after their general election, life goes on in Belgium. People go to work, they meet their friends, the beer is world class, the food is good, folks go about life as they always have. And there is still no government.
Hopefully the country will provide an inspirational example to the rest of the EU and split under the pressure caused by increasing Flemish unwillingness to pay the parasitic leftists who dominate Wallonia. Of course things might get messy but more likely it will be a velvet divorce… but the really interesting thing for me is that society and the economy continues to function just fine without any active government at all. No new laws, no cabinet meetings, and yet somehow the sky has not caved in and the world keeps turning.
A few days ago we quoted Adriana sticking it to Andrew Keen in a debate. Well she is at it again in a bit more detail this time on her own blog.
Irritatingly, debating with the man invariably leads from his arguments to the person he is. It is like trying to have a conversation about a picture or an image with a colourblind man. He is looking at the same thing but, in his vision, there are colours missing and so in his mind the resulting image may be fundamentally different from reality. In the end, you find yourself insisting that the colours are really there and that he should just take your word for it. He, on the other hand, insists on describing what is in front of him without taking any notice of others telling him that his vision is flawed.
I particularly like the bit about him ‘re-setting’ each time so that no intellectual progress is possible with the man over time even if you successfully refute some part of his argument… next day it is as if the previous debate never happened (kind of like watching old non-story-arc episodic SciFi shows that never referenced previous events).
Read the whole thing.
Iain Dale has an article in the Telegraph called Gordon Brown is out to destroy the Tories, which makes for interesting reading.
Not surprisingly I have a somewhat different take on what the implications of Gordon Brown’s “ruthless” political tactics would be, should he be successful and finally make the Tory’s collapse once and for all.
Of course Labour want to destroy the Tory party… as it is now ideologically indistinguishable from Labour under the dismal Cameron, they are clearly fighting for the same centre-left statist voters as neither side cares about conservatives.
As a consequence voters who are actual conservatives ideologically have only one genuinely conservative party to vote for and that is not the preposterous Blue-Green caring-sharing hug-a-hoodie tax-and-spend Tory party, it is UKIP. Thus is Gordon Brown well and truly “destroys” the Tory party, it might actually finally force the rump of suicidally loyal Tories to look elsewhere for their psephological fix on election day.
In fact if Brown manages to destroy the Tory party, he will be doing actual conservatives a great service (though in truth it will be ‘Dave’ Cameron and all those who voted for him to be leader who actually destroyed the party, not Brown).
In both the USA and UK, much of the debate about how to react to the military situation in Iraq really strikes me as really odd. If a person thinks the available facts indicate we are not doing well against the insurgents, surely the choices should be either:
- Conclude the enemy will inevitably win and no military and political victory is feasible, therefore accept being defeated and get out completely as soon as possible
- Conclude the enemy can be beaten, but not at an acceptable cost, so accept being defeated and get out completely as soon as possible
- Conclude the enemy can be beaten and therefore reinforce to improve the military force levels (i.e. the ‘Surge’) in order to actually win
What does not make any sense to me is any talk of reducing force levels by a person who does not think we have either already won or already been irretrievably defeated… and the stated position of most politicos on both sides of the Atlantic is neither of those things.
Yet surely to argue for any reduction in military force levels in Iraq by anything less that 100% and to argue that things are not going well, is tantamount to saying you support a policy to make the allied military situation even worse.
Orwell imagined a political order that would try to change people by expunging certain terms from the vocabulary in order to make the very concepts those words represent un-knowable.
Of course Orwell had not heard of the European Union. To quote EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini:
I do intend to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector… on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism
And of course this will also block anyone researching the history of Nazi German and all manner of other governmental action throughout history . It might be interesting to speculate on what the motivation of someone like the EU’s “Justice and Security” Commissioner really are.
(via Ben Laurie)
There is an interesting article in The Times about Ehsan Jami, a former Muslim who rejected his religion in the aftermath of 9/11. He is organising a movement to fight for the rights of people who leave the Muslim faith and as a consequence face the threat of death, as mandated by the Koran.
This is not an issue on which there can be any compromise whatsoever. However it is also an issue which needs to be highlighted not just for the sake of former Muslims but as a means to rubbish the advocates of multicultural relativism. This is an issue that must be forced down the throat of anyone who wishes to practice Islam in any civilised country.
The administration has sent you here today to convince the members of these two committees and the Congress that victory is at hand. With all due respect, I don’t buy it.
– Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs committee, accusing General David Petraeus political motivations when delivering his report on military progress in Iraq. And of course a seeker-of-truth like Tom Landos’ utterances on the military situation could not possibly be motived by political considerations, right?
… too busy with politically incorrect activities…
It is interesting that the French government is now apparently seriously trying to stop people eating Ortolan, a delicacy I once tried some years ago (that said I ripped it apart rather than the traditional method of eating it whole). A small matter to be sure but It really does seem to me that the control obsessives like to pick on the people who have tastes or habits some despise, as a way to gradually control more and more aspects of civil society.
Smoking is another interesting example: wait until social attitudes mean smokers are not in the majority and only then use the force of law to repress the hard core. This dynamic is why I have often thought that people who are statists and also homosexuals, i.e. who are members of a group that is always going to be disliked by a significant portion of the population, are really quite stupid. There will come a time when they reap what they sow.
I suspect all of us do something that a lot of other people will dislike and there is an entire class of people out there who use that fact to convince ‘us’ to support the use of the state to “do something about that”.
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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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