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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As requested… a Samizdata facebook group

· Administrative

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.

October 16th, 2007 | Comments are closed

Why Ayaan Hirsi Ali matters

· Middle East & Islamic

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.

October 10th, 2007 | Comments are closed

A perfect time to abolish the Post Office

· UK affairs

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?

October 5th, 2007 | Comments are closed

A credulousness of Conservatives

· UK affairs

I like to figure out the appropriate term for collections of things (a disorganisation of libertarians?), and upon reading the bizarre responses to Dave Cameron’s speech at the Tory Party conference, a ‘credulousness of Conservatives’ came to mind.

The Times writes of the speech, remarkably describing the entire exercise in dissembling as ‘refreshingly spin-free’:

By the time David Cameron got up to give his conference speech yesterday, it had become an awful lot easier to present him as a man of integrity in a world of spin. That was not the main theme of his speech, but it was a clear subtext. The Old Politics is failing, he said. And he explained why: top-down statism has not wrought the improvements that everyone seeks. This was an argument for limited government, not merely another shopping list.

Clearly there must be someone else in the party who just happens to share a name with party leader Dave Cameron, as obviously no one who writes for an august publication like The Times could have mistaken Dave “greener-than-thou we will match Labour’s spending on public services” Cameron for an honest advocate of limited government in any way, shape or form (or in fact a honest advocate of anything other than the notion “Dave Cameron should be Prime Minister”).

Now, if it was in fact the same Dave Cameron who runs the party who said things to indicate he is a supporter of limited government, do you think that maybe, just maybe, he is saying those things not because he believes it but because he is at a conference attended by activists for whom the term “limited government” is not a dirty word? And if so, could he just possibly be saying those things so these activists do not defect to UKIP in disgust or, more likely, spend next election day gardening or playing Halo 3 or just about anything else to deaden the pain rather than vote for someone who has lied and lied and lied to them and who is not in fact a conservative at all? Could he just possibly be saying what they want to hear in the hope they will pretend they never heard him advocate more ‘green’ taxes, sumptuary laws in the form of de facto rationing of air travel for the plebs, more public spending and more regulation, allowing those things to vanish down the ‘memory hole’ because they want to believe their woeful party still stands for limited government regardless of all the evidence to the contrary?

Just askin’.

October 4th, 2007 | Comments are closed

The principled-stand-of-the-week by Dave Cameron

· UK affairs

Dave Cameron is actually a very funny guy. His faux sincerity and Forceful Leader hand gestures (no doubt practised in front of a mirror for best effect), combined with crassly obvious weathervane-like changes of political position, are the perfect stuff of parody. I expect most politicians to be insincere as it is more or less a job requirement, but I find the combination of mannered earnestness and whore-like opinion poll based ideology-of-the-week strangely compelling viewing.

In truth the principle-free pursuit of power he represents is so toxic that I want to have an endless series of Two Minute Hates at the mere mention of his name… but then when I see that phoney baloney shtick of his in full televisual motion and pimple enhancing digital hi-rez colour, I find myself grinning from ear to ear at the sheer absurdity of the man (and indeed the party that voted for this bozo to be its boss). He changes direction faster than a startled fish and the fact anyone believes anything that comes out of his mouth is a source of morbid fascination to me.

September 28th, 2007 | Comments are closed

Alisher Usmanov discovers that networks have surprising properties

· Independent sites & social media

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.

September 23rd, 2007 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)

The ‘Jena 6’… the issue is the same as the Mohammed cartoons

· North American affairs

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?

September 21st, 2007 | 59 comments - (Comments are closed)

Full XML feed

· Administrative

As requested, Samizdata.net now provides a full text XML feed for those who want it.

September 20th, 2007 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)

The interesting example of Belgium

· European affairs

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.

September 20th, 2007 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)

Off-line does not know how to handle ‘trolls’

· Media & Journalism

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.

September 18th, 2007 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)

Will Gordon Brown be the saviour of British conservatism?

· UK affairs

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).

September 14th, 2007 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)

The military choices for Iraq

· Middle East & Islamic · Military affairs

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:

  1. 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
  2. Conclude the enemy can be beaten, but not at an acceptable cost, so accept being defeated and get out completely as soon as possible
  3. 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.

September 13th, 2007 | 70 comments - (Comments are closed)
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