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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I quite like iTunes, finding the ‘look and feel’ better than any other music players for both my Mac and PC… however I made the mistake of upgrading to iTunes 7 the other day and found its ugly, laggy and above all the sound quality was dire with crackling and buzzing sounds clearly audible.
Looking on the internet I see I am far from the only person this has happened to. How Apple could release such a pox ridden piece of software is a marvel. Avoid at all costs until it is well and truly patched. I have gone back to the previous version with which I am entirely happy and will probably stick with it for some time now unless I can find an alternative player that I like.
Not much time to blog today… blame AnorakLight, Lynch Rider Lulu and Victoria Hume live at the Troubadour. Well recommended.
A British evangelical Christian, Stephen Green, has been charged with using ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour’ after he handed out leaflet contained Biblical quotes critical of homosexuality at a homosexual event in Wales. The article indicates neither he nor his leaflets were abusive or threatening, just that they pointed out that the Bible states that homosexuality is a sin and so it urged homosexuals to ‘repent’ and stop sinning.
What caught my eye about this case was…
Several thousand people attended the event, which included a gay rugby tournament and a ‘top gayer motor show’, and which was addressed on the importance of tolerance by Liberal Democrat council chief Rodney Berman.
So as Rodney Berman is such a strong supporter of tolerance, presumably he will soon also be arguing for Mr. Green’s right to be tolerated for his views and behaviour. After all, tolerance does not imply acceptance or approval and so even if Mr. Green calls for gays to stop being gay (i.e. he does not approve of their sexual behaviour and wishes to convince them to act differently), unless there is more to this story unreported, there seems no evidence Mr. Green does not tolerate gays. Yet some homosexuals who disapprove of Mr. Green’s views of their behaviour are clearly unwilling to return the favour and tolerate him. They called for the law (i.e. force) to be used to prevent him peaceably expressing himself.
As the LibDems pride themselves on supporting (non-economic) liberty, will they come to Mr. Green’s defence and demand tolerance for everyone? I wonder what Mr. Berman has to say on this matter.
There is an article in the Independent called Another fatal day in the ‘war on terror’ in which Patrick Cockburn, the “award-winning journalist and author” states:
The real reason of the increasing violence in the Middle East is the return to imperial control and foreign occupation half a century after the European colonial empires were broken up. This is the fuel for Islamic militancy. This is why fanatical but isolated Islamic groups can suddenly win broader support. Governments allied to the US and Britain have no legitimacy.
It seems to me that “the real reason for the increasing violence in the Middle East” is a bunch of Saudi Arabian Muslims hijacked several aircraft flying over the United States and used to to commit mass murder in 2001 and thereby caused the US to defend itself. Forget that and nothing makes sense.
The Taliban, the government who sponsored and facilitated Al Qaeda’s attacks on the USA, did not take control of Afghanistan because of a “return to imperial control and foreign occupation”, except in the sense that foreign Arabs did indeed occupy parts of Afghanistan.
Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and the Taliban all pre-dated the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Pretending they were caused by unwise actions of western governments rather than by the development of anti-modern Islamist ideology centred on Iran and Saudi Arabia, puts the blame in the wrong place. If the US and UK have made any major strategic mistakes, they were not intervening in more force in Iraq and to have not started working to encourage ‘robust’ opposition to Wahabbism in Saudi Arabia and Shi’ite fascism in Iran decades ago.
A driver gets arrested for dangerous driving whilst… blind… and his lawyer, Timothy Gascoyne, argues that he should be acquitted because “the question is not whether his driving was dangerous, but whether being blind makes it dangerous”.
I am curious how many people in court were struggling to keep a straight face. Clearly Timothy Gascoyne missed his calling as a comedian!
The creation of a super-democratic body created by central government called the Standards Board for England, which can exclude members of a local council who were elected on a specific issue platform because ‘their minds are already made up’ has been described in the Telegraph as ‘hampering democracy’. This is rather like saying having your head cut off ‘hampers thinking’… true but more than a tad misleading. British understatement is alive and well it seems.
The Standards Board’s function is to prevent single issue politics by simply disallowing a ‘difficult’ elected councillor from doing what they were elected to do so ‘hampering’ democracy is not an unintended consequence, it is what the Standards Board for England does.
Face it, the whole point of the Standards Board of England is to prevent councillors who are elected on the basis of views unpopular with the establishment from being allowed to disrupt business as usual by asking difficult questions and proving resistant to being pressured by established political groupings.
So let us call the Standard Board for England and their network of ‘ethical standards officers’ what they actually are: Commissars.
Yours truly got a mention in a whimsical New York Times article by William Safire in which he makes the point that “coiners can’t be choosers”… once an epithet, in this case Moonbat, escapes into the general meme-pool, the coiner has no control over how it actually gets used.
Robert Bidinotto has an interesting article up discussing the admission in the Washington Post that their reporting on the matter of former CIA agent Valerie Plame and former US ambassador Joe Wilson was completely wrong.
Buried in this editorial is the fact with the most far-reaching implications: that Joe Wilson falsely claimed that he had “debunked” White House charges that Saddam had been trying to buy uranium in Niger. It turns out that Saddam had been trying to buy uranium, so that Iraq could build nuclear weapons.
Thus, it turns out that the White House stands vindicated on one of its key arguments for going to war against Saddam: that this thug and his regime were actively pursuing a WMD program. So…where are all the headlines about this? Except for this editorial admission by the Post (which implies that the newspaper had been taken in, rather than played a key roll in disseminating the lies), where are the media mea culpas, retractions, and apologies for many months of false, anti-Bush “conspiracy” stories? Don’t hold your breath.
I must confess when I quickly zipped through the specific WaPo article mentioned earlier today, I paid more attention to the Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson aspects of this saga and not really pick up on what I now realise was the ‘bombshell’ aspect to all of this: it seems that Saddam really was shopping for uranium in Niger.
Interesting.
The ‘Conservative’ party in Britain continues to provide evidence for my theory that a vote for Dave Cameron is a vote for 99% continuity with the policies of New Labour. All they do is argue over which party is better at managing the introduction of new regulations and deciding which form confiscatory taxes should take. One party says “What about the environment?” and the other party replies “What about the poor?” Which party takes which position at any given time is an entirely cyclical rather than intellectual matter.
So if you like what Britain is today, why not stick with New Labour? But if you hate the extraordinary erosion of civil liberties, the arrogant yet ignorant statism, the pandering populism… why vote for a different party which is in overwhelming ideological agreement with New Labour and even apes them stylistically?
At least voting LibDem would be a vote for people who have some truly different policies regarding non-economic civil liberties… and a vote for the UKIP really is a vote for throwing a large spanner into the machinery of state (although I am not an uncritical fan of UKIP, they are the only party I would even consider voting for with any pleasure).
If the Tory party wins the next election, I think that is it for the UK for many years to come. If Dave Cameron gets into Downing Street that will have proven that the radical centre which constitutes ‘Blairism’, a populist authoritarianism which is starting to adopt totalitarian positions, is the only viable politics in Britain. That would validate Dave Cameron’s decision to jettison every last vestige of Thatcher’s pro-capitalist legacy and unless the Tory Party as it currently exist is destroyed by yet another election loss, we will see the move towards what might as well be a one party state become an entrenched reality.
Cameron delendus est.
The Labour Party under Tony Blair becomes ever more totalitarian, registering children so that the state can decide how to regulate theit lives and threatening to ‘intervene’ in people’s lives to prevent a child from becoming anti-social before it is born. It will do this by offering state ‘help’ to ‘underprivileged’ *(as preposterous an expression as has even been contrived) families, with the threat of force if the state’s ‘help’ is not accepted.
Logically the next step will be a state enforced eugenics programme to prevent the birth of ‘anti-social children’. You think I am joking? I assure you I am not. Members of the media class have occasionally called for eugenics that without causing one tenth of the outrage amongst the chattering classes that would be caused by, say, questioning the morality of the welfare state. As long as Tony Blair and his ideological clones in the Tory Party refuse to accept that the decay of British society is a direct consequence of replacing natural social mechanisms with state regulations (i.e. the regulated welfare state) radically interventionist measures are inevitable. They are left with increasingly extreme and totalitarian ‘solutions’ to the problems they have created because the true causes, and therefore the actual solutions, are off limits not just from political action but even from discussion.
An analogue would be the officers in command of a ship attempting to come up with a method of effective navigation but refusing to allow even the possibility that the world may be a sphere rather than flat.
And as neither Labour nor the ‘Conservatives’ will countenance even the discussion of anything that might involve a significant rollback of the regulatory welfare state, people who think things like force backed eugenics could not happen in Britain are quite simply deluding themselves. Logically I cannot see how that will not happen in the quite forseeable future given what is being said on high.
In the past I have lambasted famous actors, singers and sporting ‘heroes’ who have allowed the (frankly remote) threat of terrorism involved in a long distance flight to cause them to change their travel plans. You do not have to be a great warrior to do something to help defeat Islamic terrorism… you just have to refuse to let yourself be terrorised.
And so it is nice to see a Hollywood A-lister made of sterner stuff than some that could be mentioned. The precarious state of things in the Middle East has not stopped Natalie Portman going to Israel to visit friends and family. Bravo, Ms. Portman, good for you.
Tougher than Schwartzenegger, harder than Willis, only a little larger than a well-fed wombat
Michael Totten has another excellent and well illustrated article reminding us that rockets fired into Israeli civilian areas are not just launched from Southern Lebanon.
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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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