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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… 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”.
There could be an interesting storm brewing when you see things like this…
Gold has raced to a 16-month high of $700 an ounce as investors seek to shelter their cash after stock markets ended the week sharply lower. The yellow metal has clawed back around $30 this week, raising hopes it could revisit last year’s highs of around $730 an ounce. Although gold is traditionally strong at this time of year, the rout in credit markets is fuelling further appetite for the safest investments.
and this…
A sharp drop in foreign holdings of US Treasury bonds over the last five weeks has raised concerns that China is quietly withdrawing its funds from the United States, leaving the dollar increasingly vulnerable.
I am trying to join the dots but instead of a bull or a bear, the outline looks a bit like a hippopotamus. Not sure what to make of that.
Michael Gove, the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath, has written an interesting and very ‘bloggy’ article in The Times with a subsection that was right on the money called Left-wing cant and the indefensible:
There’s a special sort of piece that appears only in The Guardian (or The New York Times) that deserves to be recognised as a journalistic genre in its own right. They masquerade as balanced and judicious profiles of individuals. But in fact they are vigorous defences, or at least pleas in mitigation, for people who cannot be allowed to be seen as guilty of any great sin because they’re On The Left.
We had two this weekend. We discovered last week that the playwright Arthur Miller, who abandoned his disabled son after the child was born because he was, in Miller’s words, “a mongoloid”, avoided all contact with the child until they met, to the playwright’s surprise, at a meeting where Miller was championing a better deal for disabled people. This sort of behaviour is beyond satire. To seek applause for your stance on behalf of suffering in general, while being so indifferent to the fate of individual suffering, is the quintessence of canting left-wingery. But for The Guardian Miller was as much the victim as anyone.
But their treatment of Miller was positively caustic besides their lionising of one of Britain’s most shameless intellectual apologists for evil. A fawning tribute to the Eric Hobsbawm, 90, made light of his championing of Soviet communism and his support for Stalin, the gulag and totalitarian tyranny. I’m happy to leave the old devil in peace to enjoy his dotage. But can we at least be spared any more laying of garlands at the feet of this man who supported mass murder?
Quite, although I am not so forgiving as the Honourable Member for Surrey Heath. It is intolerable that the Guardianistas get a free ride on these sort of issues. Now if only the leader of Gove’s hilariously misnamed party would call a spade a spade like that.
Now it might seem odd that someone on record as being as hostile to the EU as me might hope that Gordon Brown gets his way and just bounces Britain into adopting the resurrected EU treaty against what is quite obviously the wishes of the majority of politically active people in Britain.
But that is what I want. I want the EU to get its way and for there to be a dramatic shift in power from London to Brussels, with commensurate huge diminution in democratic control of the political process in this country. I regard the fact Gordan Brown can look the nation in the eye and utter such a naked lie that the current offering is not, to quote the Chancellor of Germany, “the new constitutional document is the same as the old constitutional document: the only difference is that it doesn’t have European Constitution as its title”, with pure delight.
In short I want Gordon Brown to strip away the myth of the democratic accountability. I want the system that has been so seriously damaged over the last ten years to be broken in such a visible way that even the most purblind self-deluding fool can see just what sort of country they really live in. Let all sixty million people on this island hear the stream of pork pies issuing from the gob of the man in 10 Downing Street, with the entire apparatus of power standing behind him nodding.
Although very worthy folks like the UKIP will argue passionately for a referendum, knowing that their position will almost certain win (which is of course why it will not be allowed to happen), in truth the long term position of a fringe party like UKIP will be vastly improved if the ‘nightmare scenario’ does indeed come to pass. To actually break the current political monoculture will require far more really pissed off people than currently exist in Big Bruvvah anaesthetised Britain.
The system needs to break and millions of people need to be confronted with their political irrelevance before anything really… interesting… can happen.
So good luck Gordan, I wish you great success in screwing over your subject people and locking in the centrist regulatory Big State at the more remote European level. More and faster in fact.
By caving into the demands by the Taliban to get their troops out of Afghanistan in return for the return of South Korean hostages, the Korean government simply entourages more of the same tactic. Clearly the US seriously erred accepting military ‘assistance’ from Korea given that the South Korean government are not just utterly craven, they seem to have no concept of cause and effect. The only way to demotivate hostage taking is to respond in the opposite manner to what is being demanded.
If I was the US government I would be making a simultaneous complete withdrawal of US forces from South Korea, timed to coincide with the departure of Koreans forces from Afghanistan. Quite why a wealthy nation like South Korea requires US forces to keep its psychopathic neighbour at bay is unclear anyway. Perhaps this incident will shake loose any residual attachment to the value of subsidising South Korea’s defences in the minds of US taxpayers and politicians. There are parts of the world that it may well suit the US to defend but surely South Korea is more that wealthy enough to look after itself given how primitive North Korea is.
There is an interesting article about the current political crisis in Belgium on Libertarian.be. Yes, yes, I know, when is Belgium not having a political crisis? But if this article is correct, this might be The Big One… and it could be the single currency, the €uro, that made it all possible.
The news media are still buzzing about the resumption of Cold War era style patrols by their ancient bucket-of-bolts bombers (not that I have anything against old-but-good combat aircraft) right up to the edge of NATO airspace. But for me the most interesting news to come out of Russia these days is that far from being the Neanderthal thug he is often portrayed as being, Vlad had decided it is time to reach out to that segment of the Russian electorate he has always stayed away from…
“See my studdliness, Tovarich!” … he is now actively courting the Russian Gay Vote. Bless.
What I find so infuriating about the situation in Southern Iraq is that it was all so avoidable, and by that I do not mean by not getting involved in the first place. Clearly I was wrong to assume that just because the British government did the right thing helping with the ouster of Saddam Hussein, they would do what was needed to actually secure victory in the aftermath and focus Britain’s resources on achieving military success against the Iranian based insurgents in their area of responsibility. Silly me.
What US generals see, however, is a close ally preparing to “cut and run”, leaving behind a city in the grip of a power struggle between Shia militias that could determine the fate of the Iraqi government and the country as a whole. With signs of the surge yielding tentative progress in Baghdad, but at the cost of many American lives, there could scarcely be a worse time for a parting of the ways. Yet the US military has no doubt, despite what Gordon Brown claims, that the pullout is being driven by “the political situation at home in the UK”.
A senior US officer familiar with Gen Petraeus’s thinking said: “The short version is that the Brits have lost Basra, if indeed they ever had it. Britain is in a difficult spot because of the lack of political support at home, but for a long time – more than a year – they have not been engaged in Basra and have tried to avoid casualties.
“They did not have enough troops there even before they started cutting back. The situation is beyond their control.
It is not like Britain lacks the troops to send in order to apply the needed force to Basra and its environs. What exactly are the 23,000 British soldiers defending Rheindahlen, Saxony and Westphalia from at the moment? It is extraordinary that the standard response to things getting rough militarily these days is not to reinforce but rather to cut back in-theatre thereby increasing the pressure of those troops left behind… hardly an approach calculated to bring success.
I thought the one thing the damn state was capable of was waging wars, particularly ones of its own choosing. If it cannot even do that, what the hell use is it? Even less than I thought, and that is saying something.
The Russian airforce has recently resumed long range patrols, approaching the airspace of Britain and Diego Garcia… and I am pleased to say the correct response has come from the US State Department:
“If Russia feels as though they want to take some of these old aircraft out of mothballs and get them flying again that’s their decision,” Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, said. “That is a decision for them to take – it’s interesting. We certainly are not in the kind of posture we were with what used to be the Soviet Union. It’s a different era.”
Amen. This is the comment I left on the Telegraph article:
Who cares? All this talk about the resurgence of Russian power is tosh. Just look at the numbers. Even with all their gas and oil, Russia has the same GDP as Italy (and Italy is not an economic monoculture based on what comes out of the ground). Compared to China, the EU and the USA, Russia is, strategically speaking, in the minor league. If the quasi-fascists who run Russia these days want to rattle their little sabre, strut around like Mussolini and pretend they matter, let them. The appropriate response to their antics? No response at all.
I think the murderous actions of the Russian secret service in London are far more worthy of harsh responses than the antics of their military. I suspect a reaction to these military flights consisting of broad indifference and maybe the odd embarrassed snicker is far more likely to enrage the Kremlin than shaking a sabre back at them. The Devil does not like to be mocked.
There is a strange furore brewing over pharmaceuticals giant Johnson & Johnson suing the American Red Cross over their use of… the Red Cross… on certain commercial products.
My first reaction was “What the…? Have J&J gone completely nuts?”
But then I actually read the background to the story from someone who works at J&J, and also got some background from someone I know who works with them, whereupon I realised actually it is the American Red Cross who have gone nuts. In fact they are worse than nuts, they are acting both unreasonably and quite dishonourably.
Clearly J&J must be aghast by the PR mess that taking legal action against a venerable institution like the Red Cross is going to stir up… and the Red Cross knows that. And so it is very clear to me that when you read the Red Cross press release, what is going on here is a cynical bit of capitalist bashing so that the Red Cross can use their sainted reputation to tear up an agreement they reached over the appropriate use of that Red Cross symbol in… 1895.
Now you might think that how can J&J claim to own the rights to the Red Cross symbol in the USA? Sure, that seems weird, but the fact is the American Red Cross did agree that J&J did indeed own it all the way back in 1895, so that is an indisputable fact, and in return for J&J’s forbearance for the Red Cross using that symbol (not to mention a century of monetary and product donations… but then as we all know, no good deed goes unpunished), the Red Cross undertook not to use the symbol as a logo on products in the USA that directly compete with J&J products that also use that symbol. And so it was for one hundred years.
Until one day the Red Cross decide it no longer suits them, no doubt on the advise of some overpaid shister. It is a shameful think that an institution that people take to represent charity and honour can quite literally trade on that perception in order to act dishonourably. Sometimes big companies act appallingly, but sometimes they are just big targets for other who act dishonourably. J&J have no choice but to defend their trademark but the only winner in all of this will be a bunch of crapulous American lawyers. Such stupidity.
Update: some more background here.
Lately it seems that hardly a week goes by that we do not get some new chilling preview of the Police State that many in the political class are trying to bring about . How about this one?
Tens of thousands of people who have failed to pay court fines amounting to more than £487m would be banned from leaving the country under new powers outlined by the Home Office. Ministers are also looking at ways of using the new £1.2bn “e-borders” programme to collect more than £9m owed in health treatment charges by foreign nationals who have left the country without paying.
The programme, to be phased in from October next year, will also allow the creation of a centralised “no-fly” list of air-rage or disruptive passengers which can be circulated to airlines. The e-borders programme requires airlines and ferry companies to submit up to 50 items of data on each passenger between 24 and 48 hours before departure to and from the UK. With 200 million passenger movements in and out of the UK last year to and from 266 overseas airports on 169 airlines, an enormous amount of data is expected to be generated by the programme.
Of course as the government freely admits, it will use this to monitor everyone’s movements for all manner of purposes beyond “air-rage” or people using the NHS. I can only imagine how quickly the list of thing that will get you stopped at the border is going to grow. Sorry, you have an appointment with a ‘social’ worker next week and we need to make sure you turn up. Failed to put your recycling out? BBC tax not paid yet? Outstanding parking tickets? Your carbon ration has been used up? Your kiddies refusing to attend the local educational conscription centre?
You think I am joking?
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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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