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.
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The music business has fought tooth and nail against digitalisation in general and the internet in particular and I have long suspected that regardless of how it struggles, eventually Big Music will go the way of the buggy-whip industry, with music returning to its ‘craft’ roots and simply ceasing to be a big business, at least in the way that is currently understood, the mass market eventually giving way to a mass-of-niches.
I wonder if this is a sign that future has taken a step closer?
Sandi Thom, the unknown singer-songwriter who built up a huge following on the internet, went straight to No 1 with her debut single. The 24-year-old shot to fame after claims that her live performances in the basement of her home were being watched by more than 100,000 people via the web.
Regardless of sour grapes claims the viewing figures were inflated in this case, I wonder if the wave of the future has arrived?
In the latest police anti-terrorist ‘swoop’ in which a man was shot (though not killed this time), there now seems to be some question of whether or not initial reports of a chemical weapons ‘factory’ and ‘hazardous materials’ being found have any truth to them at all. Moreover the highly dubious sounding report yesterday indicating the man who was shot was actually shot not by police but by his own brother is being denied by the lawyers of the injured man.
However at this stage all the information coming out is from the two least reliable sources imaginable, namely the lawyers for the people arrested (i.e. people who are paid to lie on behalf of their clients) and the police (i.e. an institution with a track record of lying about the facts when they shoot someone). As a result it is probably best to wait a while before drawing too many conclusions about what really happened and whether or not the guys arrested are guilty of anything more than being Muslims.
Whilst I would be delighted if the anti-terrorist squad had broken up an Al-Qaeda cell in the UK, the bitter experience of the Jean de Menezes killing and subsequent criminal conspiracy to cover up the facts, not to mention the scandalous Harry Stanley killing, means that the police and entire structure within which they operate cannot be trusted to tell the truth, it is only clear physical evidence that can show us what to believe.
The alleged atrocity carried out by a fire-team of US Marines in Iraq is ghastly news and whilst I hope, like so many other allegations against Allied soldiers in the Middle East, it turns there is much less to this than meets the eye, the reports do seem to be indicating that this time there really was a monstrous massacre of innocents.
However the fact this horrendous incident has not been swept under the table shows that the US military does have structures that work as intended. Whilst it is appalling such a thing could have happened, it would be even worse if it had happened and the people responsible got away with it.
In that respect at least, one cannot but compare the accountability of the USMC with what happened when British police shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes, a innocent Brazilian man, and what we got was a stream of barefaced lies and complete fabrications and still no one has been brought to book (which should not just be the people responsible for the killing, but everyone involved with what has clearly been a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice).
It is when things go badly wrong that you discover how decadent an institution has become. The contrast between the US military and British Police is quite revealing.
Last night Adriana showed me a very strange DVD which will probably not appeal to folks who dislike ‘art house’ movies… but if you like bizarre English phantasmagoria at its quirkiest, set in Brighton and by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean no less, then you will probably just love Mirrormask.
Young actress Stephanie Leonidas has presence beyond her years and reminded me of the young Natalie Portman in Leon, which makes me think she may be one to watch in the future.
I particularly liked the evil sphinx-cats. It is all intensely English, in a magic mushroom induced hallucinogenic Alice in Wonderland sort of way. “We are not at home to Mister Grumpy”.
Alain Lamassoure, a prominent French (naturally) MEP is proposing the idea of a pan-European tax on e-mail and SMS text messages and is quoted as saying:
“Exchanges between countries have ballooned, so everyone would understand that the money to finance the EU should come from the benefits engendered by the EU.”
Huh? I hate to break this to Mr. Lamassoure but countries neither communicate with each other nor ‘exchange’ with each other, companies and people do. Moreover I think the ‘benefit engendered by the EU’ is highly debatable. If I am understanding this klepto correctly (and as he is both French and a politician, that may be beyond me), he thinks that without the EU, people would not be able to exchange e-mails and SMS messages? And if that is not what he means, what the hell does he mean? I do not even grasp what he is talking about, let alone understand why even more money should be appropriated from people to pay for that sublimely corrupt institution.
George Galloway thinks assassinating Tony Blair would be justified because of the war in Iraq… but if that is true, others might start thinking if Mr. George Galloway MP wants people to play that game, this notion should be more widely applied to all whose political views inevitably have violent consequences.
And so if politics did start to become more overtly and directly violent, with PM’s being bumped off because of their foreign policy decisions, this new paradym could well lead others who equally as intemperate as the Honourable Member for Bethnal Green and Bow to decide it was now acceptable (or ‘justified’ if you like) to start bumping off people who have demonstrated by their support for communist mass murderers like Fidel Castro as well as inciting violence against British troops by Ba’athist fascists and sundry Islamo-fascists in the past.
Just for reference, a definition of treason is:
The act of betraying; betrayal of a trust undertaken by or reposed in anyone; a breach of faith, treachery. High Treason or Treason Proper is the violation of a subject of his allegiance to his sovereign or to the state, levying war on the King’s dominions, adhering to the Queen’s enemies in her dominions, or aiding them in or out of the realm.
Articles often reveal more about their author than their subject. A case in point is a fairly bizarre article by Martin Samuel in the Times. He writes about US warships being named to commemorate the 9/11 atrocities and moreover being contructed in part using steel salvaged from the WTC (I have no idea if this is true but I will take his word for it). He then goes on to say:
The ships would commemorate the attacks, if that is the right word, which it is plainly not.
If a warship named after something does not thereby ‘commemorate’ it, then what is the right word?
Exactly what is being commemorated anyway? Not the memory of the victims, as nothing is known of how they want to be remembered, and certainly not whether they would wish a warship to be dedicated in their name.
And so by that logic, the cenotaph in Whitehall and all those Great War memorials in almost every town and village in the UK do not ‘commemorate’ the victims of Britain’s various wars either, unless a Ouija board was used to conduct a post-mortem opinion poll of Britain’s war dead to see how they might like to be remembered. Or perhaps, seeing as how we British are so much more insightful than those funny Americans, the wise old Ministry of Defence as a matter of policy asks all servicemen “In the event you buy the farm for Queen and Country in some godforsaken hole we sent you to, what sort of edifice would you like us to use to commemorate your demise?”
Who knows in which direction their anger would be channelled? It could be that some of the dead might have thought over-reliance on warships was their downfall in the first place.
Well call me presumptuous if you like but from what I know of human nature in general and Americans in particular, my money is on the hypothetical post-mortem anger of 9/11’s victims being directed at the sons of bitches who murdered them, rather than at Presidents Clinton or Bush or the US Navy. Just a guess mind you.
While not excusing wicked acts committed by terrorists, it would be foolish to view the behaviour of terrorists as motiveless. If we regard terrorism as the work of madmen and unrelated to our relationship with their world, we learn nothing from history.
I love it when ‘sophisticated’ and ‘nuanced’ Brits and Europeans lecture Americans about history, given the millions and millions of corpses littered across Europe within living memory. Attacks by people from abroad are caused by interventionist foreign policies, clever Mr. Samuel tells us, with his wise Old World perspectives, which of course explains how places like Poland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Czechoslovakia etc. managed to sit out World War II in peace by minding their own business.
Moreover whilst nothing is guaranteed in this life, as close to certainty as you may ever come is when someone says “While not excusing wicked acts committed by terrorists…” they are about to do exactly that.
His entire article tells us nothing about America, American foreign policy, the people who committed mass murder on 9/11, the people who died on 9/11 or even how to commemorate the untimely dead. All his article tells us is that Martin Samuel neither likes nor understands Americans. It also reveals that unlike many in the Muslim world whose perpectives have changed considerably since that fateful day in 2001, it is Martin Samuel who has a very poor understanding of cause and effect.
The NHS is now being instructed to turn its back on ‘alternative’ treatments such as homeopathy. This is a very good beginning… now all we need is for it to turn its back on non-alternative treatments too and Britain can start to allow a First World healthcare system to develop.
I have seen worse. Ian McKellen stole the show. Wait for the DVD.
At least I have an excuse for this…
I have been criticized a few times for using the popular term ‘Islamo-fascist’ to describe, well, Islamic fascists such as the Iraqi & Syrian Ba’athists as well as the theocratic Iranian regime. Well if this report is correct (Iranian sources are denying it), they are planning to adopt a measure which should dispel all doubt as to the appropriateness of the term.
I oppose the ID card & panoptic centralised database plans of the UK government on the grounds it is a monstrous abridgement of civil liberties and truly deadly expansion of state power… but even on the utilitarian basis of the state’s own objectives, the entire scheme is a disaster in the making. This comes not from some civil rights activist but from an IBM researcher whose specialty is secure ID cards.
The big issue is that the UK government, plans to set up a central database containing volumes of data about its citizens. Unlike other European governments, most of whom already use some form of ID card, the central database will allow connections between different identity contexts – such as driver, taxpayer, or healthcare recipient – which compromises security. Centrally-stored biometric data would be attractive to hackers, he said, adding that such data could be made anonymous but that the UK Government’s plans do not include such an implementation.
Read the whole article.
(hat tip to commenter Shaun Bourke)
There is another interesting article in the Washington Post about why it is a bad idea for conservatives to always support the Republican Party regardless of what it does. This closely echoes what I have been saying about conservatives in Britain supporting David Cameron’s Blairite Tory Party. The WaPo article does not take the pro-liberty stance on this I would (it is an article by a conservative for conservatives) but the underlying political calculus and logic behind it is hard to argue with: if your votes can always be taken for granted, do not be surprised if your views do not count for anything with the person you voted for.
The differences between the two main parties in both Britain and the United State has been largely an illusion for quite some time. In the US at least the Republicans and Democrats use very different cultural references and language to make themselves appear meaningfully different, but in Britain the utterances of David Cameron and Tony Blair are so similar that I would be willing to bet that if shown to a person out of context, most would be hard pressed to tell which of the men said what.
What makes the tribal loyalties of conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic so foolish is that time and again, year after year, those loyalties are not reciprocated. Tory policy towards the EU, where the parliamentary party has never reflected the views of the Tory rank and file, is perhaps the most extreme example but by no means the only one. Similarly it has long amazed me how conservatives who excoriated Clinton for trade protectionism and hugely costly ‘social’ programmes (a misnomer if ever there was) remained silent when G.W. Bush did the same in spades.
If conservatives are not willing to punish their leaders for fear of the Other Tribe getting elected, they have only themselves to blame if they get the same corrupting policies the Other Tribe’s leaders would have enacted anyway.
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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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