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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Sci-fi addicts will understand why the Star Trek reference in the title is appropriate.
A comment by the minimally named ‘IC’ on a previous article here neatly sums up an aspect of the situation in the United States:
How many of those who died in the Katrina catastrophe chose not to evacuate? When you died and became one of the satistics, your loved ones would cry and wail in front of CNN, someone started to sue, some politicians’ cushy jobs died with you for not doing their jobs of rescuing you from yourself. Hence we have all these idiotic CYA [cover-your-arse] laws.
On the other hand, if you were forced to evacuate, and Katrina hit Houston instead, and your New Orleans home was looted while you were gone, you start fuming in front of CNN, some politicians got blamed for forcing you to leave…
So either way, it was all bound to be Bush’s fault 
Thanks to Sean Sirrine of Objective Justice for pointing out the live audio feed from police radio in Hurricane blasted Baton Rouge.
Astonishing.
Want to see some robust news blogged from the front lines of the crisis in New Orleans? Try here.
Perhaps someone has some ideas on links to reputable sites where people can help with donations? Here is one place to start if you want to lend a hand.
Our woes may be minor indeed compared to the hapless folks who incurred Hurricane Katrina’s ire, but Samizdata.net’s server have been intermittently gasping today under some weather-aftermath related issues.
The fact that the leaders of the Sunni minority oppose a federal structure for Iraq, and have the ability to torpedo the new constitution, does not change the reality on the ground that Iraq is already in effect three nations.
The Kurds in particular have both an effective local administration and by far the best militias to call on if needed. The Kurdish situation is also helped by the fact that it was really the Peshmerga who moved into the vacuum and liberated the Kurdish region whilst US and British forces smashed Saddam’s armies in the south.
Eventually if the Kurds do not get the autonomy they desire, it is just a matter of time before they simply secede and I rather doubt the US had either the stomach or the inclination to use force to prevent what is a purely internal matter for the Iraqis and Kurds. Any in any case, so what if Iraq breaks up? The obsession with ‘stability’ and countering Iran is what lead the West to unwisely back Saddam Hussain for so many years and look where that got everyone in the end.
An independent Kurdish Northern Iraq may give the Turks cause to fret (unfortunate but them’s the breaks) and give Iran acute dyspepsia (which has to be a good thing) because Kurdish success in Iraq will no doubt give the Kurdish minorities elsewhere ideas above their station. However I fail to see how thwarting long standing Kurdish aspirations is in the interests of the US and UK, particularly as the Kurds have been quite amenable to US interests as of late and have shown themselves to be the sharpest operators.
Of course the prospect of a Shi’ite Islamic Republic of Southern Iraq is not very agreeable but it at least has the virtue of allowing more tailored pressures to be put on the three constituent parts of ‘Iraq’ rather than a probably futile one-size-fits-all constitution which in any case may fall apart as soon as western forces pull out.
An Iraq of highly autonomous cantons is probably the best that Iraq’s Sunni politicos have any right to expect because the alternative is never going to be a return to the ‘good old days’ of Sunni dominance and centralised rule from Baghdad, it is going to be splitting the county in three independent parts. And there is something to be said for that anyway. To hell with ‘nation building’… sometimes the cause of liberty (and probably long term stability too) may be served by a bit of ‘nation wrecking’.
There is an article in The Spectator which perfectly sums up the expression “The state is not your friend” that described the nightmarish encounter someone had with the officious little shits that are employed to police our borders and protect us from middle class Australian women.
It should be only under the most extraordinary circumstances in which an agent of the state should be able to legally refuse to give you their name and thereby avoid personal responsibility for their actions. Read the article and then ponder the thesis that the reason many people take jobs in places like the Immigration service is to satisfy a psychological need to exert arbitrary power over others. This is your tax money at work.
If the UN says something should or should not be done, it is a safe bet that doing the opposite is most likely the correct course of action. Thus when the UN says Britain must not expel Muslim clerics who incite terrorism, clearly this is indeed the best policy.
It does not matter if a compass always points south, as long as you know that you can use it to find your way just as effectively as with one which always points north.
So the CCTV camera tapes which would have shown the facts pertaining to tragic shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes were blank. Right. But the IPCC says they have the vital CCTV footage. Ooookay, that is sorted then.
What the hell is going on?
A truly vile act by animal ‘rights’ thugs has had the effect they wanted: a farm will stop breeding guinea pigs for research experiments in the hope that the corpse of the owner’s grandmother, dug up and stolen by these ‘heroes’, will now be returned to her grave. In their considerable history of despicable behaviour, this was a new low.
I hope the state does its job and tracks down those responsible (I have my doubts) but there are some insults so dire that were I in the position of the Hall family, I would feel justified doing quite literally anything to find those responsible. I for one would not be prepared to share a planet with them. These animal rights thugs have shown that the courts are not the only way to compel people to do things against their will and courts are also not the only way to get justice. A truly dreadful affair and a reminder of the contempt with which these ‘activists’ should be treated.
We were told that the CCTV footage of the fatal incident was not available because the media from the cameras had been removed before the shooting so that detectives could examine them for clues relating to the failed 21/7 bombings.
Not so. The tapes were ‘blank’.
According to the print edition of tonight’s Evening Standard:
Senior Tube sources have told the Evening Standard that three CCTV cameras trained on the platform at Stockwell station were in full working order. The source spoke out after it emerged that police had returned the tapes taken from the cameras saying” “These are no good to us. They are blank.”
A station log book has no reported faults concerning the CCTV cameras which would have been expected to record the crucial moments as Mr. de Menezes approach the train on 22 July.
Ok, so the cameras were working but the tapes are…blank. Of course just because everything else the authorities have said (the victim ran from the police, he was wearing an unseasonable padded jacket, he jumped the ticket barriers, he was not restrained when he was shot dead) has been a lie, we should not jump to the conclusion that the videos from these fully functional cameras were blank because some member of The Plod put them in a machine and pressed ‘ERASE’, right? I mean, without any evidence that would be jumping to conclusions, right?
I am sure many of you have heard the joke: An Arab meets one of the screenwriters from Star Trek and says “Hey, how come there are no Muslims on the Starship Enterprise?” The screenwriter replies “Because the story is set in the future.”
But many of the most puritanical and intolerant Muslims have their eyes very much on the future. Over on the Social Affairs Unit‘s blog, William Ridgeway has writen an interesting piece called “Those Drunken, Whoring Saudis: Desert Islam’s problem with women”:
Encroaching modernity has resulted in an increase in the place and power of Desert Islam in everyday society. Contrary to widespread Western beliefs about the trajectory of the Middle East as a hesitant but inevitable climb to liberal democracy, the region is actually going the other way – fast. Academics call this “Islamicisation”, the spread of radical Shi’a and Wahhabi beliefs and practices throughout the region. Because of this trend, the Middle East one sees nowadays is nothing like it was, say, fifty years ago. Around the 1950s, about the time oil was being discovered in the Gulf, many Muslim nations were relatively liberal by today’s standards. Alcohol flowed freely, women went uncovered and there was lively public debate about “Ataturk’s way”, the separation of Islam and state, modernisation, and dialogue with the West. The Middle East seemed to be going in the right direction.
Saudi oil changed all that.
I still think in the long run secular western civilisation will crush radical Islam under its sheer weight but it is an interesting article. Read the whole thing.
I have just heard a rumour from a usually reliable source that effective either yesterday or today, the UK state has put on-line some system by which all access to the internet in the UK now goes through a government server system to enable them to monitor, well, everything you do on-line. Is the UK state now rivaling China in its efforts to control and monitor its subject people?
Has anyone else heard anything about this?
…is Kenneth Clarke to defy the odds and end up the head honcho of the Conservative Party. Why? Because appointing a Europhile statist would be the absolute best way to split the party so irretrievably that it writes the party off once and for all.
Then maybe we can work on getting a proper opposition party that actually has a coherent ideological position, well, at least as coherent as a main stream party can even be. Hell, it can even call itself the ‘Conservative Party’ for all I care.
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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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