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]
|
It is not hard to understand why the government does not regard mugging as so serious a crime that it should always lead to a jail sentence, provided “minimal force” is used.
As the government have long made it clear that people should not defend their property with force against people who try to take it by force, they regard just handing your money and goods over as sensible and responsible behaviour. In short, they think the way to prevent violent crime is to stop people resisting and therefore remove the need for muggers to use actual violence rather than just the threat of it.
In other words, they want to make muggers more like tax collectors. Is that really so surprising?
Some of the Samizdatistas have been in the USA for Thanksgiving, much to the consternation of the turkey population, given that we are all members of PETA (People for Eating Tasty Animals).
As for much of the time we have been in the wilds of Pennsylvania without an internet connection (the horror, the horror), we have been unable to post about our various jolly japes in the Land of the Free.
We were releaved to have made it out of the People’s Republic to the relative safety of the Keystone State
I could hear the turkey’s crying “The British are coming! The British are coming!”
An Armalite toaster? Is this country great or what!
The womenfolk in these here parts are made of stern stuff
Getting ready for Thanksgiving Dinner with twenty friends: the quintessential American experience
Celebrating dangerous (thankfully) right wing extremists
Vast mounts of turkey washed down with red wine: tryptophan overdose!
A local family tradition: eat the turkey and then take the young ones out and show them how the turkey ends up on the plate
One of the Samizdata editors goes looking for those turkeys who ratted us out earlier. The British are coming and this time they are armed and pissed off. Good food, great people and things that go boom. Damn I love this place.
We will be back in London soon. Bugger.
Are the political opponents of George Bush, who are advocating cut-and-run in Iraq, about to take the attrition war there (which by any objective measure the USA cannot possibly lose on the battlefield) and turn gradual military advantage into decisive political defeat?
Discuss.
There is controversy over the fact the Metropolitan Police are using ‘dum dum’ bullets (which is a term used by people who know nothing about firearms to describe any bullet designed to expand upon impact).
The reason a police force or anyone with a legitimate need to use a weapon in self-defence (i.e. far more people than just the police) would use a handgun firing expanding bullets is to (1) prevent the bullet exiting the target’s body and thereby use all the kinetic energy to inflict a wound rather that… (2) leaving the bullet with enough energy that it goes clean through the intended target and wastes energy making a hole in a wall behind them or, much worse, making a hole in an innocent bystander.
It is a scandal that the Metropolitan Police killed an innocent Brazilian man and then lied about the sequence of events that led up to that happening. It is not a scandal that they used expanding bullets to do it. Would the ignorant twits in the media and various clueless Islamic ‘spokesmen’ trying to make this into a story have preferred that the cops not only killed an innocent man but also killed or injured someone else in the train by using non-expanding military style full metal jacket ammunition? It would be a scandal if they were not using expanding bullets.
The whole point of shooting someone is to cause them serious harm so that they cannot harm you or anyone else. In what way is it somehow morally preferable to use a weapon which does not cause as much harm per round-in-the-target, thereby requiring you to just shoot more bullets into them to kill or incapacitate them?
The only dum(b) dum(b)s here are the various Muslim idiots quoted in the Guardian article and their friends in the media who think this should be an issue.
There is a snarky article in the Guardian about UK bloggers (including us). I was rather puzzled by Oliver Burkeman’s description of Samizdata.net being “operated from a large and dimly lit flat in a pristine mansion block in south-west London”.
Flat? Pristine mansion block? I do not recall if we gave Oliver a drink or three at our famous Cold War era bar when he came to visit but Samizdata HQ is a semi-detatched four floor house. Oh well, this is the Grauniad we are talking about.
Samizdatistas David Carr was on the Jeremy Vine Show (BBC Radio Two) this morning, arguing with some Labour member of Parliament who believes that firemen and ambulance drivers should enjoy higher levels of legal protection than the ordinary people in the street.
David puts his views forcefully and you can download and listen to it here (mp3 file).
Here is another in my intermittent series pointing out unusual blogs.
Hard Diamond is the blog of a British master jeweller by the name of Paul Hatton (and as any Londoner knows, Hatton Gardens is the centre of the UK jewellery trade). He takes commissions and explains here the reasons for bespoke jewellery. These are uniqueness, range and price & access to maker.
Jewellery is very personal: it is often used as a very unique way of showing love and affection, or human bonds. It often remains in families as heirlooms passed from generation to generation. It is only natural that when expressing a bond of love for another, people wish to seek something wholly unique to express the uniqueness of their feelings. Rather than something bought from even a high-end chain store, a design from a designer/maker, or a piece of bespoke jewellery, commissioned with an input in design, perhaps personalized with a birthstone or other symbolic stone or precious metal, speaks volumes about our feelings in a solid, eloquent and lasting way. I enjoy and am uplifted by working with people to make in fine jewellery or tableware an expression of their love or affection for another. Similarly, with symbols of status such as watches. A Cartier watch is a beautiful thing; but you will also see the same watch worn by other people. If I make a watch for you, often for the same price or less, you will have a unique and lasting timepiece no-one else can own.
What makes his blog fascinating is that it does not just display his rather groovy artefacts that he has created so far…
…but it also tells a story of his trade, such as this description of setting a gem in an emerald ring:
Emeralds are very fragile stones, as you may have seen from my first blog entry on the Moh’s hardness scale. It’s not recommended that this method of setting an emerald be used, as you have a 50% chance or more of damaging the stone. It takes extreme skill and experience to accomplish successfully this type of setting. When one has successfully achieved such a setting, great relief is felt, as emeralds of this quality don’t come cheaply, as I wipe the sweat from my brow…
Blogs like this make his profession come alive and he turns it into his own medium as well as a ‘inside’ story-telling space. Take a peek for yourself.
Switzerland is a bastion of efficiency and rationality surrounded by the boiling maelstrom of stupidity that is Europe… and yet even they are falling foul of idiotic political correctness and absurd defensive ‘sensitivity’.
Swiss Santa Clauses have been banned from sitting children on their laps because of the risk that they might be accused of paedophilia […] Large groups of St Nicholases parade through the streets that day before visiting children. They traditionally sit them on their laps before asking if they have been well-behaved. “We want to counteract any possible accusations of paedophilia involving our members,” the Society of St Nicholas said in a statement. “We regret having to do this, but the public has become very sensitive about child abuse.”
Hardly the end of the world but it is not a good sign that even the dependibly sensible Swiss have this crap to deal with.
The Research Defence Society, a body supporting animal research in medicine, has started a blog. They intend to use it to keep people up to date with their activities, to counter disinformation and highlight how animal rights extremists use terrorism against scientists, and to support staff involved in animal research.
The whole issue of Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize in 1932 has always pissed me off. It just rankles that he got away with it, so the least we can do is blacken the bastard’s name posthumously for the sake of the millions of dead Ukrainians he lied about.
Now that Harold Pinter has won a Nobel Prize for literature, I guess the tradition of lionising men of letters who are apologists for mass murdering leftists is still alive and well.
Want to make your voice heard on the issue of Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize? Take a look at Cyber Cossack (and check out their great site banner) and if you are in the NY area, consider lending your hand to a bit of activism.
Better late than never.
Yes, make jokes about it, so says Afshin Ellian, an Iranian dissident.
There are a couple very interesting articles over on the Social Affairs Unit blog about Afshin Ellian. As I have been saying, the voices of intolerance cannot be appeased, they need to be uncompromisingly confronted and ideally they should be confronted not just by secular westerners but by other Muslims.
Okay, so did you hear the one about the Imam, his two wives and a goat…
Flemming Rose, an editor from Denmark’s largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, reacted to news that Danish cartoonists were too afraid of Muslim militants to illustrate a new children’s biography of the Prophet Muhammad, by doing exactly that, putting Denmark’s policies of tolerance to the test by commissioning a series of illustrations of Muhammad.
In response thousands of Muslims in Denmark marched in protest demanding the newspaper be “punished”, though interestingly an Iranian woman, Nasim Rahnama, has organised counter-protests in support of the editor, managing to secure one hundred and fifty signatures affirming freedom of expression.
As I have mentioned before, when I see more people like the commendable Nasim Rahnama taking a stand then I may conclude that things are improving and perhaps modern Islam is not a blight on any tolerant society it comes into contact with. But as it stands, clearly it is the ignorant bigots who can put the largest mobs on the streets and that is why the actions of editor Flemming Rose need to be strongly applauded. It is hard to overstate the importance of confronting intolerant Islam on a cultural as well as a political level.
So when Muslim scholars attack the newspaper for its cartoons:
Lawyer and author Shirin Ebadi, who received the Nobel peace prize in 2003 for her fight for human rights and democracy in Iran, told daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten that its decision to call for and print twelve caricatures of the Muslim prophet might have been a well-intentioned attempt to prompt a dialogue on democracy between Muslims and non-Muslims in Denmark. The effect, however, had been the opposite, and in fact risked harming democracy’s cause in Islamic countries.
‘I would like to stress that I do not personally have any problems with cartoons like these,’ said Ebadi, who is a devout Muslim. ‘The problem is the way the subject is approached. It splits more than it unites.’
But that is exactly the point: it is intended to ‘split’ rather than ‘unite’ and the importance of unity is vastly overrated. No one who values tolerant pluralistic western values should be seeking some sort of compromise with bigotry. There should be no attempt to ‘unite’ with the people who marched in Denmark demanding the government ‘punish’ Jyllands-Posten, in fact they must be confronted.
And please, the scholar is making a category error because it has nothing to do with ‘democracy’. Even if a democratic majority do not want to see cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad appear in the newspapers, it is still wrong to try and use the force of law to prevent it. Dislike the idea? Fine, do not buy the damn newspaper. The issue here is liberty and democracy is far from a synonym for that.
|
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.
|
