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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David Cameron thinks it is the role of politicians to opine on what sort of clothing parents purchase for their children. I wonder if Tory voters who dislike the fact Tony Blair feels there are no aspects of private life which should not be subjected to state regulation, nevertheless like the idea of the leader of their benighted party ‘taking on’ businesses which sell clothes he disapproves of.
When Cameron says “I’ve never believed that we can leave everything to market forces,” I would turn the question around and ask if there is in fact anything he would truly leave to ‘market forces’, or as I prefer to call it, ‘personal choice’. I have no view regarding the rights and wrongs of what sort of clothing people buy for themselves or their children and I have no idea what the discontinued line of BHS clothing were actually like… but the real ‘creepy’ thing here is that a politician feels such matters are any of his damn business.
It looks like Mrs. T is reading some very sound literature these days. Any chance the Blairite currently leading the Tory party might be interested in something that challenges the orthodoxy like that book? I have my doubts.
It is good to see efforts being made to remind people just how monstrous things were in Eastern Europe before the collapse of communism. Films like Life of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) should be a good antidote to those who like to equate the oppressor and the oppressed.
Just as it only took a few years for revisionist liars like David Irving to try and re-write the history of Nazi Germany more in accordance with their likes, too many left wingers who praised the prevailing socialist system in Eastern Europe have not been forced to confront what it was they were supporting and what they wanted to force on the rest of us. What a pity there was nothing analogous to the process of ‘de-Nazification’ following the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The price of undue restraint in war is always paid in the blood of your own soldiers. The Moqtada al-Sadr’s ‘Mahdi Army’ has previously given the US/UK forces all the justification it ever needed to crush them militarily and put Sadr’s head on a pike for all to see. He took up arm against the British and Americans, his people killed allied troops and yet rather than wipe out his supporters when they were cornered in Najaf, crushing his organisation once and for all and removing him from the political equation by putting a bullet in his head, he was allowed to make a deal , rejoin the political process and rebuild his armed strength.
And now the price for that idiotic restraint is being paid. It was demonstrated when Sadr’s militia were allowed to just walk away free at Najaf after making a few empty promises to lay down their arms in order to end the fighting, that the consequences of taking on the allies in Iraq are not military annihilation with no possibility of being accepted as a legitimate political figure.
On the contrary in fact, so not surprisingly Iraq’s warlords see little downside to strengthening their credentials with nationalist and Islamist elements by taking intermittent swipes at allied troops in the knowledge they can always mend fences later of the US or UK looks like they are putting them under serious military pressure or if they corner more of your people than you can afford to just write off.
To the surprise of no one who is not a professionally optomistic spin-doctor in the pay of the US government, the situation in Iraq has settled into a messy attrition war. Although the US cannot lose this contest militarily, it most certainly can lose politically.
However I think this as this latest bit of true propaganda (almost but not quite an oxymoron) shows, the other side in Iraq may be determined but that does not mean they are all that competent.
That said, I would not read too much into this… Churchill was also a fairly indifferent shot by many accounts.
Several times I have called for the Tory Party, at least in its current form, to be put to the torch so that a viable and genuine opposition party can form in Britain (even if it is called ‘The Tory party’) as an alternative to Blairism in its various forms.
But as I am hardly bashful about my hostility to modern conservatism, dislike for democratic political parties in general, contempt for that invertebrate David Cameron (or Tory Blair as I like to call him) and the whole class of people who appointed him, I do not expect my views to carry much weight with folks who take a less bile spitting view of the political system than me.
However it would seem that Peter Hitchens, who has been by any reasonable definition the very epitome of a core Daily Mail Tory and ‘sensible’ mainstream establishment figure, pretty much takes the same view that the current Tory Party needs to be destroyed. I have been mildly incredulous to read some of his more recent article in which he has started saying things which are more or less identical to a wild-eyed anti-establishment chap like me on this issue, and moreover for pretty much the same basic reasons.
I cannot help but wonder if all those large bodkins I have been sticking in this David Cameron doll I have dangling in front of me via a little noose have not started to pay off.
I am fairly used to intermittently getting peeved e-mails from people who get their comments deleted wailing about how they cannot understand how a ‘libertarian’ blog can ‘censor’ free speech (never mind that Samizdata is a blog that has many libertarian writers, rather than a libertarian blog per se).
But today I got two such e-mails within minutes of each other, one from a racist troll whom I have long banned and one from a Muslim troll who keeps posting passages from the Koran in random articles. As a result I thought I would revisit the issue yet again, even though Samizdata has several articles on this subject, such as this one.
It is really simple: this is private property and as a result anything published here is at the sufferance of Samizdata’s editors. We invite comments but that does not mean we relinquish control over our property, just as when you invite people into your house, you do not relinquish the right to subsequently un-invite them if they act inappropriately or if you just want them out for whatever reason.
Apart from spam comments, the main reason we axe people’s remarks are that they are gratuitously insulting, grossly and uninterestingly off-topic (interesting but off-topic is sometimes tolerated) or they are endlessly repetitive. Racists and Muslim extremists, who between them make up 85% of the non-spam deletions, almost always fall into the last category. It does not matter that their arguments are shredded and rebutted, neither group are psychologically capable of accepting their questions have been asked and answered unless they have been agreed with. Even more annoying, the racists are capable of hijacking a discussion about cricket or Beethoven into yet another absurd phrenological rant about racial IQs. The Muslim extremists tend to just reply to reasonable questions with great long quotes from the Koran as if that will magically end all arguments. Well life is just too short to tolerate such people flogging their dead horses on our turf and preventing rational discourse and reasonable progression of a discussion.
And when certain commenters wear out their welcome, sometimes they do not just get their comments deleted, they get banned completely. This is often a shame because a couple of the banned commenters had some interesting things to say when on the rare occasion they can bring themselves to stop obsessing about the issue that dements them. Yet there are only so many hours in the day we can spend moderating Samizdata (we do have off-line lives, believe it or not) and when the majority of a person’s comments have proven to be obsessive rants, they get banned.
And who gets to make that call? We do. Our house, our rules. End of story.
Police state’s cannot work unless people cooperate with them, and the supermarket Tesco is doing eaxctly that: helping make Britain’s emerging police state a reality.
A man took some photographs to be developed taken whilst deer hunting (showing him posing with a deer he had bagged), to his local supermarket, Tesco. However when the staff saw the developed pictures, they called the police because they felt the images ‘inappropriate’, although he had broken no animal cruelty or firearms laws. So how do the police get involved when something is deemed ‘inappropriate’ rather than ‘criminal’? Nevertheless, the police duly did get involved and moreover according to the article they questioned the man for “several hours”. Unless there is a great deal more to this story that came out in the article, I cannot see what this guy did to justify being questioned at all, let alone for “several hours”.
Now this raises more questions: firstly, what could they possibly question him about for ‘several hours’? If they were trying to ascertain if he had a licence for the weapon in the picture, surely all they needed was his name, a police computer terminal and about five minutes of some police office worker’s time. So what exactly where they asking this man to justify?
Also, Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, does not think that his company was the one who was acting in an ‘inappropriate’ manner, strangely stating:
Tesco does not discriminate against any lawful section of the community.
Sir Terry has not thought that statement through clearly as it is manifestly not the case (and if he dislikes that assertion, his lawyer is free to contact me). To ‘not discriminate’ would mean Tesco treats lawful gun owners the same way way it treats lawful dog owners and lawful car owners (all of which must be licenced).
So, following that statement of non-discrimination, I wonder if every time (or even occasionally) the staff at Tesco photolabs see a person driving an automobile in a picture they develop, something that can only be done lawfully in Britain if you have insurance and a valid driver’s licence, do they call the cops so they can grill the guy in the picture and make him produce proof his vehicle was licenced? If they do indeed do that, well, then I suppose Sir Terry is correct and Tesco do not ” discriminate against any lawful section of the community” as they really do apply the same standards to everyone. If that is not the case, then Sir Terry is not being truthful as clearly they do indeed discriminate against a lawful section of the community, namely those who own licensed firearms.
Needless to say I will never shop in a Tesco again.
The ASI hosted a gathering of bloggers and curious old media types in Westminster last night. Times journo Danny Finkelstein and well known blog commentator Tim Worstall. As with all the ASI events I have attended, I rather enjoyed myself and there was a large posse of OG bloggers to swap scandal with.
Read more about it from Jax here.
Rumours are afoot that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are going to be in Hollywood’s attempt to bring Atlas Shrugged to the big screen. They might make an interesting pair to play John Galt and Dagny Taggart.
Just as I suppprt the right to publish drawing that annoy the hell out of some Muslims, I also support the right to publish drawings which annoy the hell out of some Christians.
If some find provocative images of Jesus offensive, they should feel free to express their outrage… but should not feel free to express their outrage to their legislators, because the implication is clear that they want them to use the violence of law to prevent themselves from being offended… to which I can only say, they have no such right.
Charles Clarke, the current boot boy in the Blunkett-Howard tradition, is upset that the government’s abridgement of fundamental rights is being called for what it is. It is at least a good sign they feel the need to be a bit defensive as previously they scarely seem to try and diguise their contempt for notions of privacy or personal civil liberty.
Although the Tories (or at least David Davies) have said in the recent past that they would scrap the whole monstrous ID card plan, I wonder if that will remain their view if they actually end up in power with this scheme already in place. I have my doubts that any party which so recently has Michael ‘a touch of the night’ Howard as its leader really has any honest commitment to civil liberties.
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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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