For those of you who have been following the story of the Pakistan born ex-Muslim blogger ‘Isaac Schrödinger’ who has been seeking asylum in Canada, I am delighted to report a very happy ending.
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January 5th, 2007 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
 There is an interesting story about Simone Clarke, a ballerina with the English National Ballet who has incurred the ire of many by being an outspoken member of the neo-fascist British National Party (and who happens to also have a Chinese boyfriend). Calls have been coming in thick and fast for her to be sacked by all the usual suspects.
As the ENB gets tax money, it is inevitable that this becomes a political issue, which is yet another reason no artistic organisation should ever be given public money for any reason whatsoever. However I really have no fundamental problem with the owners of a company or institution sacking people or refusing to hire them in the first place for no other reason than they do not like them (which is not to say I necessarily think firing someone because you dislike them is always a good idea). Just as Lee Jasper wants Simone Clarke to be fired, I would probably be disinclined to hire Lee Jasper to work for me because I just do not like people who support using the law to abridge the right of people to freely associate and dis-associate. Oh I share his aversion to racists (though Simone Clarke can hardly be a conventional white supremacist given that she has a Chinese-Cuban boyfriend), I just despise people who want to use the the state to back their social prejudices with the violence of law. I am perfectly happy to state my prejudices and to act on them to whatever extent suits me on my own property and perhaps to try and get them acted upon within any company I have any degree of control over, but I do not expect my views to be imposed as the law of the land. So although the issue of the detestable tax funding makes this a more murky issue, if I was one of the Nobs at the ENB, I would hire and fire on whatever criteria I thought was appropriate to the job. If the bosses think being a member of the BNP is bad for their ‘business’, they should feel free to sack Simone Clarke. If they feel her nasty fascist politics make not a jot of difference to her ability to do the job and other considerations do not matter, they should tell the people calling for her to be fired to get stuffed… but it should be their call (and of course that will only be really true if they stop taking tax money to support themselves). January 4th, 2007 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
London’s New Year parade, watched by a crowd of more than 500,000, was the unlikely setting for a small victory of normal civic virtue over the craven risk averse culture so beloved by the post-modern political classes of the western world. An American marching band and cheerleaders from Fort Myers High School in Florida flew to London and participated in the parade in spite of being initially banned from doing so by school officials nervous about terrorism in London. A revolt by the parents of the students reversed this bizarre ban. It might not seem like much but any time someone makes a common sense refusal to allow the minuscule risk posed by Islamic terrorism to alter one’s behaviour, it is an event worthy of praise, just as the reverse is worthy of scorn. January 2nd, 2007 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Labour Party has a big vested interest in maintaining the United Kingdom as Scotland is more or less a bastion of collectivist voters these days. As a result, they get rather twitchy when the topic of Scottish independence from Britain comes up (though I have always seen it more as English independence from Scotland). Of course this is also yet another area of common interest with the Tories, who have always been wedded to the idea of the Union in spite of the fact they seem to be widely detested north of the border, regardless of their steady progression under Cameron into becoming just another European style regulatory statist ‘Christian Democrat’ party. Yet it seems that the aspirations of Scottish nationalists are indeed coming closer to being fruition as they are getting de facto allies due to the rise of long dormant English nationalism. Breaking up the UK into its constituent parts sounds to me like a win-win for all concerned: British people who have a deep desire for totally pervasive regulatory statism will have an English-speaking place to move to where they can vote SNP and get the government they deserve, I mean, want… Scotland’s best and brightest entrepreneurial folks will decamp to England and probably start pushing for more a less regulatory environment… everyone is happy. The end of the UK is not as unthinkable as it was just a few years ago. In fact I am not sure it will even that big a deal if and when it ever happens. January 2nd, 2007 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Another year starts… and we shall be there to blog the bits we find interesting (once we get over the effects of tonight)… 
Some more strange outfits were observed…
Our lawyer demonstrated he was as quick with a six-gun as he was with a legal writ…
Adriana selects the Target For Tonight…
Quick! Pour it now or we’re going to miss Big Ben chiming!
Wassail! Happy New Year…
…from all at Samizdata HQ Champaign for our real friends, real pain for our sham friends. Good health to those who love liberty. January 1st, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Michael Totten has written a couple very interesting articles called Hezbollah’s Putsch and Hezbollah’s Christian Allies. Well worth checking out as you just do not see stuff like this in the mainstream media all too often. Also consider dropping your mouse on his PayPal donations button to support his excellent international reportage. December 31st, 2006 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
There has a been a Treasury report indicating taxes will increase for the next 50 years. If that does indeed come to pass it would be, to state the bleedin’ obvious, a Bad Thing. However that is really not what I want to comment on, but rather…
Now talk about having your cake and eating it too, or more correctly having our cake and eating it too. Such remarks by any Tory commentator are obviously predicated upon an assumption of wishful thinking and a mayfly-like memory amongst their intended audience. Does anyone remember ‘Dave’ Cameron’s plans to confiscate and redistribute wealth? Or add more expensive ‘green’ regulations to govern people’s lives in order to pander to the voodoo science of the enviro-mentalist lobby? The notion that the Tories are a lower tax/less regulatory alternative to Labour is preposterous if the words of the party’s leader mean anything whatsoever. So how can a ‘Conservative’ spokesman keep a straight face and claim that rising taxation is a facet of Labour governments when ‘Dave’ have been going to such lengths to make it clear his Tory party represents continuity with Labour’s ideology of authoritarian centrist regulation? If all the UK does is continue to alternate between largely identical Tory and Labour governments, Britain really can look forward to fifty years of increased taxation and the economic and social decay that will bring. Fortunately I do not see either party lasting anywhere near that long as dominant political forces. December 28th, 2006 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Although I am in a tryptophan (or more likely, just gluttony) induced haze, let me quickly file an after-action report from the front… 
The menu was sort of ‘Anglo-Slavic’… sauerkraut soup followed by pheasant,
Some bizarre items of clothing were encountered…
An excellent Lebanese wine was discovered…
…examined…
…and consumed in considerable quantity. And then…
strange Christmas presents were exchanged
As Dale has already added his greetings from Ulster, Adriana and I would like to wish all our readers and contributing Samizdatistas a hearty Christmas, well provisioned with all the goodies capitalism doth provide. December 25th, 2006 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Will Hutton has an article in the Guardian called 2006: a vintage year for ideas that will change our world that is right on the money about the importance of that triumph of free expression, ‘Web 2.0’. Or as I would put it, the web is the tool that will break the old meta-contextual basis of old thinking… and then the rest of Hutton’s article then piles on wave after wave of ‘old think’ completely locked into the orthodoxy of a statist meta-context.
Hutton quotes Richard Layard as if his conclusions and support for some very creepy totalitarian policies are self-evident and widely accepted outside the Benthamite circles in the two main UK political party HQs, which is not the case (although perhaps his use of ‘we’ means ‘Guardian & Independent readers like me’). Moreover it has probably not occurred to Hutton (i.e. he is locked onto meta-contextual assumptions that society must rotate around the state) as it is clearly an axiom for him that ‘well-being’ is something within the government’s power to dispense, that perhaps it is the decay of civil society and growth of the state, rather than a lack of ‘correct’ state policies at imposing happiness, that might be the problem. My view is that the likes of Dave Cameron can only be a solution to the purported ‘crisis of unhappiness’ if they all start acting like lemmings and go jump off a high cliff. Seeing that would certainly make me very happy. But the web is indeed the future, not the Tory or Labour parties, nor the Guardian or Telegraph or BBC. Why? Because there are inherent dis-economies of scale when it comes to the web. By this I mean I can set up Samizdata and the Guardian can set up their own blogs (and fine worthwhile blogs they are… the Guardian is really one of the few newspapers in the world which really ‘gets’ the Internet), but in spite of their brand and wealth, it costs me a tiny fraction ‘per eyeball’ to get hundreds of thousands of readers per month compared to them. Sure, more people read their website than read Samizdata but in terms of bang-for-buck, I win hands down and a lot of people do read us… and there are a lot more blogs than newspapers. Likewise a worthy outfit like 18 Doughty Street can put together excellent podcasts and do top class vlogging, but a significant cost and investment in infrastructure and salaries… and Brian Micklethwait can put up very effective podcasts for more or less nothing. The implication of this ‘dis-economy of scale’ is something that will have little effect in the short run but will change everything in the long run. It means that although the Internet can be used by huge corporations and even huger governments, individuals motivated by something other than accountants have intrinsic advantages. Most importantly I think this points the way to how civil society will eventually redress the balance of power vis a vis the state and those who feed off the state, and abruptly reverse the trends of last century of moving towards Rousseau’s goal of suppressing the free and several interactions of civil society and replacing them with politically mediated regulatory formulae. Now that is future-think. December 25th, 2006 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Labour has contrived to do something very difficult indeed… they have made the ‘Conservative’ party look good. By announcing that failure to produce your ID card will make a person liable for a £1000 (about $1,850) fine if, for example, they cannot find and return the ID card of a recently dead relative, they have allowed David Davies, the Tory shadow home secretary to very reasonably point out that the ID card scheme…
…which puts me in agreement with the ‘Conservative’ party and that does not happen very often. December 24th, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The more I read about the flood of money coming into the City of London from the United States, the more I am convinced that in the spirit of Christmas and fraternal Anglosphere conviviality, the people of London should say a heartily thank you to Maryland Democrat Paul Sarbanes and Ohio Republican Michael Oxley. In fact, in the new year I plan to launch a subscription appeal to put up a pair of gold plated statues somewhere in the square mile, depicting these two fine politicians throwing handfuls of dollar bills to a multitude of grateful City of London bankers, fund managers, stock brokers and other sundry worthy capitalists, as great numbers of companies decamp from New York and list in London instead. And so Paul and Michael, on behalf of all those fine folks here in Merry old England whose Christmas bonus packages have gone through the roof, thank you. We could not have done it without you. God bless globalisation. December 23rd, 2006 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
A large contingent of Samizdatistas were seen making merry and getting blotto at the party of a certain Reuters journalist tonight. As Christmas party season is in full cry, blogging may be a bit… sporadic… over the next few days. December 22nd, 2006 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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