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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There is an article in the National Review by former Sunday Telegraph journalist Tom Gross what lifts the lid on what the British taxpayers who fund the BBC gets for their appropriated money… not that CNN et al are much better:
CNN senior international correspondent Nic Robertson admitted that his anti-Israel report from Beirut on July 18 about civilian casualties in Lebanon was stage-managed from start to finish by Hezbollah. He revealed that his story was heavily influenced by Hezbollah’s “press officer” and that Hezbollah have “very, very sophisticated and slick media operations”.
[…]
Yet Reliable Sources, hosted by Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz, is broadcast only on the American version of CNN. So CNN International viewers around the world will not have had the opportunity to learn from CNN’s “Senior international correspondent” that the pictures they saw from Beirut were carefully selected for them by Hezbollah.
[…]
First the BBC gave the impression that Israel had flattened the greater part of Beirut. Then to follow up its lop-sided coverage, its website helpfully carried full details of the assembly points for an anti-Israel march due to take place in London, but did not give any details for a rally in support of Israel also held in London a short time later.
Without the internet to fact-check and contextualize what the media shows us, our ability to form opinions about what is happening in the world would be totally at the mercy of organisations whose reportage comes filtered through world views that are perhaps no more or less distorted than any other but which claim, without any justification, to be ‘objective’. Blogs like Samizdata do not claim to be ‘objective’ as we do not hesitate to say who we think that the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ or ‘less-worse-guys’ (we do try to be truthful however) as we take the view that as long as our biases are transparent, the reader can make his own mind up about the things we say. Bias + Transparency = Credibility. You make not agree with our conclusions but we will not intentionally lie to you.
However when organisations like CNN or the BBC claim to be ‘unbiased’, they are quite simply lying. I recall that pool reporters during the last Gulf War often said words to the effect “we are reporting under the restrictions imposed on us by the US military” before delivering their reports, which is fair enough as a disclaimer. I have yet to hear anything similar said by a reporter in Beirut reporting under Hezbollah restrictions (although I did hear one in Israel mutter that he was being prevented from saying exactly where Hezbollah rockets had struck), which in effect makes them a willing participant to Hezbollah’s propaganda efforts. In short, you are being deceived.
With the IAF striking border crossings with Syria and the Syrians shooting down an Israeli reconnaissance drone in Lebanon, perhaps a greater Middle East war is indeed at hand. As Israel really has no viable options that do not involve destroying Hezbollah and destroying Hezbollah probably requires preventing Syria from acting as either a safe haven or supply source, a wider war was probably inevitable.
Seeing the last of the Ba’athists in Syria crushed would be splendid but of course the most likely people to fill their still smoking shoes would be Islamists of some ilk. Not easy to see a happy outcome no matter what happens and yet doing nothing is not an option for Israel either given that it would be pointless to try and negotiate with such intractable enemies when in truth they will be satisfied with nothing less that Israel’s annihilation.
A woman who had (what I certainly think was) a humorous sign on her gate saying “Our dogs are fed on Jehovah’s Witnesses” was forced to take it down by British police because it is “distressing, offensive and inappropriate”. Yet seeing as Muslim extremists can walk down the street holding signs threatening to decapitate people, all with a police escort, it is clearly time to stop co-operating with the police and being so damn polite to them. Instead urge them not to allow themselves to be used to repress people’s right to express themselves and force them to fill out as much paperwork as possible. Got a lawyer? Call him. Just do not meekly co-operate.
We need to establish that there is no right not to be offended that trumps the reasonable right to self-expression. In fact I would argue that police escorted Muslims have already established that. If Muslims extremists can threaten people with death unless they express themselves in accordance with the restrictions Muslim activists want imposed on them, then we clearly do indeed have the right to make jokes about feeding Jehovah’s Witnesses to our dogs.
So stop making the job of the police easy when they try to impose such restrictions. If they want to stop you expressing themselves, do not threaten them but do not feel any great need to be unduly polite, make them arrest you and take the matter to court, every single time. I often go out wearing a tee-shirt saying “My Imam went to Mecca and all he got me was this lousy Tee-shirt”. Offensive? I do not think so but if anyone disagrees, I will not take it off and will force any policeman who takes issue with it to arrest me if he wants to stop me walking around wearing it.
Spain’s socialist government is turning its back on the post-Franco ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ approach with regard to the Spanish civil war. It plans to prohibits any political event at the location of Franco’s tomb in the ‘Valley of the Fallen’, outside Madrid. Yet whilst I am hardly a fan of Franco, the notion that a socialist government has any moral authority to suppress pro-Franco sentiments strikes me as absurd. There were no ‘good guys’ in the Spanish civil war and if the current Spanish socialists see themselves as the heirs of those who fought Franco then they see themselves as heirs to despicable would-be tyrants who were in no way admirable just because their enemy was little better. It was a war between mass murderous collectivist socialists of various dispositions against mass murderous collectivist national socialists.
In many ways the one thing Franco had to commend him was that his system of government was always unlikely to outlive him whereas a socialist system might have lasted longer… which is to say it might have lasted until the late 1980’s and in which case more the mass graves being dug up now would be filled with falangists and their families as opposed to socialists and their families (not that the left was shy about slaughtering its civilian enemies during the war).
People who get misty eyed over the resistance to Franco in the Spanish civil war are fools. It did not really matter who won, Spain was going to lose regardless. A pox on both sides of that terrible war.
There is an very commendable article on the LFB blog which applauds an Ohio Supreme Court ruling that economic development is not a sufficient reason under the state constitution to justify taking homes, in other words overturning Kelo in Ohio. However what makes the article so interesting is that it correctly identifies the poor thinking behind Justice O’Connor’s interpretation of the issues:
I need not merely infer that O’Connor is one who believes in “balancing” the interests of victims and thieves. In her formal opinion, available at the web site of the Ohio State Supreme Court, O’Connor states that the Norwood case is about “the constitutionality of a municipality’s taking of an individual’s property by eminent domain and transferring the property to a private entity for redevelopment. In doing so, we must balance two competing interests of great import in American democracy: the individual’s rights in the possession and security of property, and the sovereign’s power to take private property for the benefit of the community.”
But, as the Founders themselves should have better understood and stated in framing the Constitution, the only “benefit of the community” that may properly be attended to in most possible cases has to do with the actual rights of the individuals who make up that community. The community is best off, in fact, if no member of it may ever be robbed by government and at the behest of “the community,” whether that “community” is a group of home owners who want to forcibly prevent a mall from being built on somebody else’s property by the persons who own that property, or a group of developers who want to forcibly impose a mall on the property of home owners.
Excellent article.
Commentators who have been lambasting Israel for reacting ‘disproportionately’ in its military reaction to Hezbollah strike me as making a mistake as to what ‘proportionality’ really means within the context of a war. If a man hiding behind a wall fires a rifle at you, proportionality does not mean you must only fire a rifle back at them… it means you should only attack them with enough force to kill the enemy hiding behind a wall, which may well mean returning fire with a 120mm tank round or a 500 kg HE bomb. A nuclear warhead would be ‘disproportionate’.
I would argue that Just War Theory’s notions for ‘proportionality’ only makes sense as meaning proportional to the imperative of effectively attacking a legitimate target, not proportional to a legitimate target’s specific actions.
The welfare state is the engine of so many of the problems that the people who run this country complain about you would think its inherent problems would at least be a topic of discussion by the political class. But no. Yet a culture of entitlement without responsibility is not just a consequence of the welfare state, it is pretty much the objective of the welfare state. As a result it seems odd that the political class who presided over the growth of the all encompassing nanny state should decry the fact that people do not take responsibility for their health or behaviour when the very system they created is designed to prevent people paying directly for the health consequences of their life styles.
Yet because the welfare state is sacrosanct, it is not permitted to even suggest that it is the system itself that has produced the overweight chav generation that seems to irk the Islington set and their Tory imitators so much.
Blair said the government was banning the sale of junk food and fizzy drinks from vending machines in schools. He said if voluntary moves to limit advertising of junk food to children had not worked by 2007, new laws would be introduced. The government was also encouraging supermarket chains to adopt a single-system of labelling to identify healthy options.
“It will be much better if the industry comes together voluntarily around this scheme but once again, we are prepared to act if the voluntary system does not work”
And so if the threat of force does not work, yet more regulations will follow. Sure, that is it, we need more regulations. Yet all this dances around the issue that people buy what they want not because the labelling says this or that, but because they like it and there is no clear economic motivation to worry all too much about long term medical consequences when the NHS takes care of all that stuff. It is almost as if the Tories, LibDems and Labour are shouting at each other across the floor of Parliament, all pretending not to notice the large and very hungry elephant standing in their midst who is crapping all over the statist paradise that we would all live in if only we had a few more regulations.
Monday’s Globalisation Institute event had Andrew Mitchell MP, the Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, speaking about trying to get African countries to be more open to trade, not just with the developed world (he said sub-Saharan Africa’s share of world trade was only 2%, or a mere 0.6% if you do not count South Africa), but also to trade more between African nations. Currently African trade tariffs are amongst the highest in the world, leading to such absurdities as African countries imposing tariffs on Tanzanian-made anti-malarial bed nets. Mitchell described these correctly as quite literally ‘killer tariffs’. So far so good.
Yet strangely the Right Honorable Member for Sutton Coldfield was also very keen to point out that taking an interest in African development is a cross party ‘British’ thing, not just a Tory thing and that his party fully supports increasing the amount of British taxpayers money the state wishes to generously give away in foreign aid to 0.7% of GDP. Why are Tories so desperate to make it clear that they represent continuity with Labour policies and sensibilities, even when addressing a room with a very high proportion of free marketeers? Mitchell was positively effervescent with enthusiasm about the stream of new and creative ideas being generated by Tory thinkers on the subject of international aid and yet I came away with the sense that this was just tantamount to saying “we have new and innovative ways to give away your tax-money and ‘engage’ with NGOs because we are just as clever as new Labour at thinking up ways to do that!”. Be still my beating heart.
In short the event did little to change my thinking about the pointlessness of Andrew Mitchell’s party. But like all GI events, the company was congenial, the champagne delightfully cold and the venue most agreeable…
At the start of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, although not unsympathetic to Israel’s security needs, I was very concerned that this conflict not escalate into something which was a war between Israel and Lebanon per se. My view was that as the factions that opposed Hezbollah had been trying to undermine that organisation by getting Syrian forces out, it would be a tragedy if Israel’s military action undermined the pro-modernist forces within Lebanon.
And yet after reading and listening to the remarks of commentator after commentator speaking for various Lebanese factions, I now seriously question if there was ever a realistic chance of these people achieving a disarmed Hezbollah within Lebanon. It appears that views like those of Ahmed Al-Jarallah do not have much currency in Lebanon (and I urge the commentariat to link to Lebanese sources which suggest otherwise), which means if Israel was just going to wait for political development across the border to eventually neutralise the clear and present threat of Hezbollah, they would have had a very long wait indeed.
In short, I find myself inescapably drawn to the notion that not only is the Israeli action warranted, I now think there is no good reason the IDF should avoid attacking targets of strategic value to Hezbollah which are located in non-Hezbollah areas. Moreover, I would urge them to follow the logic of that position and start striking targets in Syria and (above all) in Iran in order to impose a cost on those governments for their actions in enabling Hezbollah.
Much as I support the idea of a modernist secular Lebanon, perhaps that is simply not within the power of non-Islamists in Lebanon to deliver until military realities have altered the political realities. In short, if the other factions within Lebanon do not want Israel to completely demolish the national infrastructure that Hezbollah also uses, they need to realise that they, as well as Israel, need to declare war on Hezbollah. As long as ports, roads and airfields in Lebanon can be used by Hezbollah, neutrality is simply not an option for anyone.
The delicate balance of power within the Cedar nation became untenable the moment Hezbollah in effect declared war in Israel on behalf of all of Lebanon and as a result, either Hezbollah is expelled from the government, declared a criminal organisation and confronted militarily by Lebanon’s army… or Lebanon (and not just Hezbollah) is indeed at war with Israel and must accept the consequences. There are no other realistic alternatives.
Quite a lot really. Whilst Haaretz is not usually my first choice of Israeli newspapers, there is a very interesting article called simply What will happen next that interviews some interesting people and makes some fascinating observations.
Incredibly, Nasrallah is making the same mistakes as Nasser. By puffing himself up, he isn’t deterring Israel; at this point, he’s only making himself and his movement a bigger and more legitimate target. Hezbollah has become a prisoner of its own myth, which is that at any moment it can go one-on-one against Israel – and win. It can’t, and now is the best opportunity to prove it – to Lebanese Shiites, to all Lebanese and to the rest of the Arab-Muslim world
Interesting stuff and well worth a read.
Omar Bakri Mohammed, the Islamic preacher thrown out of Britain for inciting Muslims to violence and calling for the Islamisation of the UK (quote: “The life of an unbeliever has no value, it has no sanctity”), wants the Royal Navy to evacuate him from the fighting in Lebanon. So he hates the UK but wants it to come to his rescue?
The Jews have a good expression expression for this: chutzpah
There is an example in the Telegraph that demonstrates yet again that we are all prisoners to the meta-context (frames of reference) within which we understand things and explain ourselves to others.
Bush turns back on science to veto stem cell Bill
… is the title of a piece by Francis Harris, reporting from Washington. And what is he writing about? Bush has vetoed a bill increasing government-funded research using human embryo cells. So Bush is not turning his back on ‘science’ at all, but rather is turning his back on providing tax money for activities that some taxpayers regard as murder. Personally I am all for stem-cell research and I do not any moral problems with the use of human embryos for research, but I fail to see why people who take a very different view should be forced to fund something they regard as child-killing… but then I would rather see no scientific research whatsoever funded with taxpayer’s money.
But within the meta-context that constrains Francis Harris’ views, to oppose tax-funding for certain types of research on moral grounds is to turn your back on ‘science’ rather than turning your back on what you may regard as ‘murder’. Just as a thought experiment, ponder this: if Bush managed to get a law enacted that allowed for the testing of dangerous experimental drugs on the inmates in Guantanamo Bay, would the title of Francis Harris’ article be “Bush backs laws supporting the advancement of science”?
Somehow I do not think so, yet logically it should be.
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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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