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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And now, for something completely different… In the last four years since I started blogging, the world of blogs has evolved beyond recognition. So I decided to offer a peek into the other corners of the blogosphere far from Samizdata’s illuminating glow. This, however, does not suggest that these blogs are unenlightened.
As the first in an intermittent series of interesting blogs, let me present something which will strike many as an odd choice on my part.
Baukjen & Vanessa’s Diary is a blog that blurs the dividing line between what is a commercial blog and a what is a private blog. The company Isabella Oliver designs stylish maternity clothes and the two principals behind that venture set up a blog that both chronicles events germane to their company and as well as elements of their private lives. This makes quite a lot of sense as spending time engaging potential customers in a conversational manner can be a much better way of getting people’s interest than interruptive advertising, which I often think is a waste of money, particularly on-line… and blogs are nothing if not about engaging people if you have a story to tell or opinions to share.
I also find this approach interesting as it helps to break down the notion that private and professional lives are perforce completely separate things. I have always suspected that if people saw trade and commerce as the social activities they are, they might be less willing to see them as something to be regulated politically. Blogs… they are not just for geeks anymore.
Meanwhile, you’ve got how many (admittedly very stupid) Australians in Indonesian prisons for something like 20 years on drug charges? So I guess the message here is kill some infidels and you’ll get two years with time off for good behavior, have a couple tabs of ecstasy on you and you’ll do 20 years in a third world prison.
– Hank Scorpio
In the last couple days I have written, and then deleted unpublished, several articles about the IRA’s much ballyhooed decommissioning (or ‘decommissioning’, depending on what you believe to be the truth) of its weapons. In short, I am not sure what I think.
To try and make head or tail of what is going on, I have been hanging out at Slugger O’Toole.
And I still cannot figure out if it is cause to celebrate or just another ploy.
The convincing win by the anti-leftist coalition in Poland’s elections would seem to be one in the eye for the statist left.
However the perils of the left/right labels are on prominent display here: Civic Platform Party is clearly on the side of the angels in most ways, being pro-market, pro-privatisation and generally in favour of liberty and a smaller state (though sadly they seem to think the €uro is actually a good idea).
Yet the senior partner in the winning team, the Law and Justice Party are really old style paleo-conservative statists, comparable to various European Christian Democrat parties. Although the Law and Justice Party are perhaps a bit more reactionary and stasis oriented than most Christian Democrats (and as a result no great fans of free-markets), at least that right-stasis orientation gives them a healthy euro-scepticism.
It will be interesting to see how this coalition manages to square its various circles or even holds together at all.
Reporters without Borders has produced a useful handbook for blogging in an unfree environment. We will be adding a sidebar link to this useful resource which has some technical tips that may be of interest to people in places where Big Brother tries to controls everything you read.
It can be purchased or downloaded for free from here.
The guide to dissident blogging
Reporters without Borders has produced a useful handbook for blogging in an unfree environment. We will be adding a sidebar link to this useful resource which has some technical tips that may be of interest to people in places where Big Brother tries to controls everything you read.
It can be purchased or downloaded for free from here.
The guide to dissident blogging
Some of Britain’s problems right now in Basra are a consequence of the absurdity of Muqtada al Sadr still walking around when killing him last year would have been clearly legitimate and just a damn good idea. At the very least he should be sitting in a prison cell. This is not an election campaign, it is an insurgency and the US missed a big opportunity to ‘retire’ Sadr when his militia previously fought against the allied armies.
When I called for ‘no pussyfooting around’, I was just suggesting that when an Iraqi faction shoots at British soldiers or throws petrol bombs at them, the respsonce should not be to just ‘contain’ it or to ‘negotiate’ with the faction responsible (at least not until much later after it has been suitably knocked down to size), no, it should be to use all the force at their disposal to try and cut that faction to pieces. Moreover, it should result in significent reinforcements being sent to give UK forces more options.
People like Sadr will use violence only if they think using violence will gain them a political advantage at a tolerable cost… so the trick is to make the cost intolerable. It is crazy to give such people a ‘second chance’ during an active insurgency as clearly all Sadr has done is use the time since he last took on the occupying powers to rebuild his power base. No, just treat the guy like the Islamo-fascist he is, put a bullet through his head and make it clear that hard line Islamists militias will not be tolerated in the Iraq.
So if local administration in Basra were truly considering handing British soldiers over to Sadr’s militia, then they need to be dragged into the nearest HQ and told if they plan on growing old, that sort of behaviour is a very bad idea. Far from giving them an apology that those undercover SAS man were free by force, they should be told to ‘get stuffed’ and expect more of the same if they prove by their actions that they are the enemy.
If the Iraqi local administration in Basra was, as claimed, about to hand over a pair of captured SAS under-cover soldiers that were in their custody to a hostile militia, then it seems that the escalation of tension and violence in Basra should be escalated further… by the British army.
Lesson One of occupying a country has to be to let any local administration know that it is the occupying army that is ultimately in control. The logic is clear: if we are there until Iraq (or whatever comes after the break-up of a unitary Iraq) has been sufficiently stabilised, then we must expect the army to use force to stabilise things, and that is a euphemism for being willing to kill people who oppose that process or interfere with military operations. If the local administration has indeed been infiltrated by enemies with antithetical aims who are cooperating with the enemy, then politics is probably not the answer at this juncture, force is. Unmake the local administration and replace it with another one at bayonet point. Show people in Iraq that some options are simply not on the menu. This is not a normal functioning civil society and should not be treated as one, any more than post-war West Germany was until acceptable institutions were in place to allow it to function as a viable post-totalitarian nation.
If Britain’s government ever wants to extract its forces at some point in the future without leaving behind something almost as bad as what was there before, it needs to be ruthless and none too squeamish. If this is a revelation to the UK government, I cannot imagine what it was thinking when this whole process started. When the decision to use force is made, use it effectively and resolutely, giving the Army the resources and support it needs to prevail… or if Tony Blair is not willing to do that, he had no business using force in the first place. What else was he expecting?
Now this gaffe by the French foreign minister in Israel would seem to defy belief…
The French satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaine reported in its September 14th issue that during the visit of French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy to the new Holocaust museum in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem on September 8, he asked – while perusing maps of European sites where Jewish communities had been destroyed – whether British Jews were not also murdered. Needless to say, Douste-Blazy’s question was met by his hosts with amazement. “But Monsieur le minister,” Le Canard quoted the ensuing conversation, “England was never conquered by the Nazis during World War II.”
Now please, somebody, tell me this is a piece of gross mis-reporting by Haaretz (not the first time that would have happened). Surely, the foreign minister of France cannot actually be that utterly clueless. It would be funny if it was not so scary to think someone like that can hold high office in a nuclear armed First World nation.
Or could he have been thinking about England in 1190 and just got a bit (ahem) confused about the dates?
Hat tip to the Dissident Frogman for unearthing this gem
Just in case you have not been already doing so, essential blog commentary on Germany’s cliff-hanger can be found over on David’s Medienkritik.
It will be interested to see if just under 12% unemployment has actually got the attention of the German electorate or is it going to be more of the same old stuff? Angela Merkel is something of an unknown quantity and the mere fact she is described as a ‘loose cannon’ by the political chattering classes makes her someone worth watching with at least a soupcon of hope. Germany badly needs an ‘Iron Lady’ so it will be interesting to see if Angela Merkel has what it takes or will the entrenched system just make her one of them.
The election hangs on a knife edge…
I think it is a mistake to assume that the motivations of all people in government, or most of the people who vote for governments, is knowingly malevolent. Most people want to believe the policies they support are ‘helping people’ because voting or passing a law makes them feel good about themselves as they are ‘doing something’. Consequently such people really dislike having it pointed out that their ‘something’ actually makes things worse more often than not, regardless of what their motives are.
That said, I think there are indeed quite a few people who understand full well the real harmful consequences of what they do, and they do it anyway because all they care about is maintaining the political apparatus from which they benefit at the expense of others. Those people will also react angrily to this being pointed out, because what they do requires their motives to be thought of as benevolent by the wider public whereas in reality it is just a force backed appropriation that benefits a favoured constituency at the expense of those less favoured.
My view is that ‘doing something’ via the state is sometimes the correct thing in an emergency (most obviously during a war, plague or natural disaster). Alas people often then apply the same logic to normal civil society outside the context of the emergency, acting as if the social logic of the lifeboat and normal civil society were one and the same (libertarians of some ilk often make the same mistake but from the opposite direction). A leitmotif of the post war British election in 1945 was “Look what we achieved together in wartime, think what we can do in peacetime!”… as if life in a total war and life in the social context of peacetime were much the same thing. The same logic used when being threatened by a totalitarian state is then applied to the ebb and flow of normal social life generally with monstrous results.
But cynical politicians who know full well the real consequences of their actions have powerful reasons to misrepresent the truth bacause all they care about is maintaining their personal power and influence and they do this by playing to people’s need to feel good by ‘doing something’… and they are the people who will do it. For this reason I think it is very important to keep pointing out the true effects of actions that governments take, and the consequences of participating in a process designed to lead to those sorts of interventions in civil society. Sometimes it is important to make people feel bad about themselves for ‘doing something’.
And that would be the law of unintended consequences.
The urge to alleviate the woes of the world can cause people to do great things. However when that urge is coupled to the power of a state, it is a dangerous mixture which can have the opposite effect to the one intended.
The think-tank Civitas has made no friends in Whitehall with its latest release titled Blair government causes child poverty and the UK Treasury is clearly incandescent at the suggestion that big government is actually the problem rarther than the solution.
But then the truth often hurts.
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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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