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And the US military is helping communists… why exactly?

· Asian affairs · North American affairs

It seems just a tad perverse that whilst uttering rhetoric about supporting freedom and democracy, the US is sending its military to help train Communists in Vietnam.

Why, exactly?

June 28th, 2005 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)

Blogging the G8

· Economics, Business & Globalization

It is good to see that some dissenting voices are being heard amidst the babble that is surrounding the G8 event.

I find it interesting to see that a moderate voice for the free market like Alex Singleton (who, unlike me, supports Third World debt cancellation) is being attacked by a neo-communist who describe him as a ‘dangerous extremist’, even though Alex’s views on these particular issues are little different from the Department for International Development or that paragon of Thatcherite virtues, Clare Short. Well who knows, perhaps some of Alex’s critics have pecuniary ties to large pharmaceutical companies? It is amazing the enemies you make when you stand up for free trade and against vested interests.

Alex is a splendid chap but frankly I do not find him nearly extreme enough when it comes to Africa, but perhaps that is my job.

June 27th, 2005 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)

Let this be the litmus test

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · North American affairs

It is just plain wrong to think things were just peachy in the United States until last week when all the Supreme Court did was make de jure what had been de facto for quite some time regarding the state’s ability to sieze private property for no other reason than to get more tax. But perhaps this is for the best as there is no longer any doubt that things are badly broken and that this should not be a left vs. right issue. As Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent:

If ever there were justification for intrusive judicial review of constitutional provisions that protect discrete and insular minorities, surely that principle would apply with great force to the powerless groups and individuals the Public Use Clause protects. The deferential standard this court has adopted for the Public Use Clause is therefore deeply perverse. It encourages those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms to victimize the weak.

Those incentives have made the legacy of this court’s public purpose test an unhappy one. In the 1950s, no doubt emboldened in part by the expansive understanding of public use this court adopted in Berman, cities rushed to draw plans for downtown development. Of all the families displaced by urban renewal from 1949 through 1963, 63 percent of those whose race was known were non-white, and of these families, 56 percent of nonwhites and 38 percent of whites had incomes low enough to qualify for public housing, which, however, was seldom available to them. Public works projects in the 1950s and 1960s destroyed predominantly minority communities in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Baltimore, Maryland. In 1981, urban planners in Detroit, Michigan, uprooted the largely lower-income and elderly Poletown neighborhood for the benefit of the General Motors Corporation. Urban renewal projects have long been associated with the displacement of blacks; in cities across the country, urban renewal came to be known as Negro removal. Over 97 percent of the individuals forcibly removed from their homes by the slum-clearance project upheld by this court in Berman were black. Regrettably, the predictable consequence of the court’s decision will be to exacerbate these effects.

I trust that decent Democrats who are not in the pockets of public sector employee associations and who actually have at the core of their convictions the desire to help the ‘have nots’ against whom the system can at time be so slanted, will set aside partisan politics and join with Republicans who are not in the pockets of well funded business interests to rebel against this savage wound to the US Constitution which in effects rips out the Fifth Amendment. Let this case be the litmus test of decency against which political figures of both left and right will judged and judged harshly.

June 26th, 2005 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)

The ascendancy of the fascist view of private property

· North American affairs

There is an industry in the USA in which people make a career based on using the power of the state to seize the private property from churches, home owners and small businesses and turn it over to large corporations in order to let them benefit by setting up large businesses and thereby provide more tax money for more public sector employees to share in.

It has been pointed out by many that this is a deeply corrupting process in which wealthy developers simply pay local government officials to use force in their narrow economic interests. Yet ‘corrupting’ seems a rather weak term for what is simply naked theft which at the same time negates the often stated pretence that the state is there to ensure individual rights are not trampled upon by the rich and powerful. In fact the Supreme Court ruling overtly institutionalises the fact that the police and courts are vehicles for the rich and powerful (business and governmental interests) to do whatever they wish if there is money to be made.

To understand how this could happen it helps if you realise that many Democrats these days take what is technically a fascist view of private property (that you are free to own property provided you further state objectives with it) rather than a socialist one (that all means of production should belong to the state). So next time a some hysterical Democrat from the Daily Kos tells you how important it is to prevent George Bush from adding some conservatives to the Supreme Court because of the need to safeguard civil liberties from The Wingnuts, understand that these same people actually have no problem from a civil liberties point of view with enriching already wealthy property developers at the expense of community churches and poor people. Exactly how this squares with their purported support for ‘the little guy’ (have you ever heard of a wealthy district full of stockbrokers and lawyers being bulldozed to make way for a Wal-Mart?) is an interesting question answered only via some impressive pretzel logic. In reality the Justices who stood up to corporate interests were ‘conservatives’. The fight to prevent eminent domain abuse now has to be conducted at State level now that the Federal battle has been lost to the corporatists.

But also many advocates of the Second Amendment talk about how private firearms are the ultimate bulwark against tyranny and injustice. Well maybe now it is time for them to walk the walk. Maybe if some of the people who make their living as ’eminent domain professionals’ were unable to scout out their targets in the most egregious of these cases without considerable personal risk, much like any criminal casing a property they intend to rob, then perhaps the true nature of what they are doing becomes harder to hide behind legal verbiage.

The only upside to this whole situation is the likely radicalising effect this ruling will have on people to whom civil liberties matter and to whom private property is the very corner stone of those liberties.

June 24th, 2005 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)

The many faces of Tony Blair

· European Union · UK affairs

Listening to Tony Blair addressing the EU parliament is a rather strange experience. He calls for reform of spending and recognising economic reality whilst at the same time declaring that he is a ‘passionate European’ and saying that he supports the idea of an intrusive welfare state.

That Blair’s views on the need to ‘liberalise’ makes him a Thatcherite radical in the eyes of many Continental politicians shows how truly doomed to long term stagnation and irrelevance the EU really is. It also shows Blair’s wish to be all things to all people and why in the long run NuLabour cannot help but choke on its own contradictions just as the Tories have.

June 24th, 2005 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata.net site surgery underway

· Administrative

Due to some ‘under the hood’ difficulties, we will be doing some code work on Samizdata.net for a while and this may cause problems with comments and site avilability on and off for the next day or so.

Hopefully we will get this out of the way as quickly as possible.

June 22nd, 2005 | Comments are closed

And as I have been saying for some time…

· UK affairs

Peter Hitchens is someone I only intermittently agree with (and this time is no different, after all he writes for that bastion of the right-statism, The Mail on Sunday) but his lengthy article in The Spectator called Conservatives do not have a party had me nodding most of the time.

There is no point in pretending that the Tory party is going to recover. This pretence only delays the construction of a new movement, which cannot flourish until we have said goodbye to the old one. It also gives the Liberal Democrats the freedom to supplant the Tory party, unobstructed, in many of its former strongholds, a freedom they are enthusiastically using.

[…]

So David Davis, who is opposed to European integration if he means anything at all, is compelled to seek the support of federalists. This, the modified Molotov–Ribbentrop pact approach, has been tried before — but only by people who forget how that pact ended. Similarly, Kenneth Clarke is seriously put forward as the saviour of a party he plainly hates.

[…]

You cannot properly defend, say, constitutional monarchy if you have no idea why you believe in it and do not understand why your opponents hate it. You cannot effectively oppose the introduction of identity cards unless your every instinct revolts at the imposition of these oppressive breathing licences on a free people.

Hitchens and I disagree over foreign policy issues (amongst other things) but it is hard not to recognise that the Tories are finished for exactly the reasons Hitchens points out and that it is not in the interests of anyone who cares what happens in Britain to have the current power elite unopposed for any longer.

And before some of our commentariat start muttering that it is unrealistic for someone like me to expect the Tory party to transform itself into a model of libertarian small state rectitude; I am not suggesting that at all. I just think that as the Conservative party is not meaningfully conservative any more and that the party’s leadership clearly do not give a hoot about conserving civil society, it needs to be replaced with something that fills that rather large political niche if the current trend towards politically correct populist authoritarianism is to be effectively opposed.

June 22nd, 2005 | 59 comments - (Comments are closed)

Let’s not be beastly to the French

· French affairs · Humour

Sorry but this was too funny to leave languishing in the comments section. For our non-UK readers, the Eurostar train currently terminates at the railway station in London rejopicing in the name of Waterloo:

Now that our relationship with France has reverted to its traditional millennium-long condition, can we be assured that before the Channel Tunnel Rail Link is finally completed in a year or two, the Eurostar London terminus at St Pancras will be renamed to align it more closely politically, historically and emotionally with the name of the present terminus south of the river?

Trafalgar, Salamanca, Vittoria, Blenheim, Crecy or Agincourt are just a few of the most obvious candidates history has so bountifully provided us with. A rather more modern choice, from 1940, might be Mers-el-Kebir…

Would not the choice of name make a particularly fine subject for a referendum?

Heh! I vote for Mers-el-Kebir as we can probably fool the multi-cultis into thinking we are being ‘culturally inclusive’ by choosing a non-European name!

June 19th, 2005 | 176 comments - (Comments are closed)

Africa’s real enemies

· African affairs

There is an excellent article in the print version of The Economist describing the situation in the Congo.

That’s the Congo. Private cellphone networks work and private airlines work because the landlines do not and the bush has eaten the roads. Public servants serve mostly to make life difficult for the public, in the hope of squeezing some cash out of them. Congo is a police state, but without the benefits. The police have unchecked powers, but provide little security. Your correspondent needed three separate permits to visit the railway station in Kinshasa, where he was stopped and questioned six times in 45 minutes. Yet he found that all the seats, windows and light fixtures has been stolen from the trains.

I put this paragraph up for all those people who have not experienced this sort of thing first hand and cannot accept that the single biggest obstacle to ending poverty in Africa is the nature of African nation states. Until that changes, sending aid under all but the most controlled circumstances is more often than not either subsidising the very people who cause the problems in the first place or, at best, flushing 90¢ on the dollar down the toilet in terms of helping the people you really want to benefit from your largess.

The solution? Good question, but it sure as hell is not more of the same. In Africa even more than most other places, truly, the state is not your friend.

June 17th, 2005 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)

DIY security

· Self defence & Security

British expats living in Spain are taking to handling their security themselves… and why not? Refusing to just throw your hands up in despair when the state proves unable to protect you is just acknowledging that you, not the state, are ultimately responsible for your safety. Vigilantes? Maybe, but why should that necessarily be a dirty word? Sometimes the reality is that ‘taking the law into your own hands’ is exactly the correct thing to do, and in any case these people are hardly hanging brigands they catch from the nearest lampposts.

June 16th, 2005 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)

Fighting comment and trackback spams

· Administrative

It is possible some comments are getting nailed by our anti-spam blacklist if the entry contains words that are frequently used in spams. Our genuine condolences if your remarks get unjustly rejected but that is the price we pay for not getting our comments deluged with viagra advert and URL’s to Russian kiddie porn sites.

Not having a blacklist is simply not an option for us as administering Samizdata.net takes quite a bit of time as it is and clearning up hundreds of spams per day (which is what we got before the blacklist) is just too time consuming.

I will check to see if the blacklist be being overzealous so please e-mail me at admin-at-samizdata.net if you think the blacklist is being too obsessive about some specific word.

June 15th, 2005 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)

Microsoft… a willing partner in repression

· Asian affairs

I realise that to do business in China means having to deal with the realities of the Chinese state, but when Microsoft becomes yet another direct collaborator with Chinese repression by adjusting its blog tools to help block online speech using words such as “democracy,” “freedom,” or “human rights,” then clearly Microsoft has become a party to the trampling of human rights in China and is not just a bystander.

Next time you hear of all the philanthropic work done by MS and Bill Gates, just keep in mind that there is a very nasty flip side to the Giant from Redmond. It would appear that even Gates has a price at which his principles are clearly ‘negotiable’.

Update:: There is some question of whether or not this is actually true according to a commenter who has set up a Chinese MSN Space blog. I will try to contact Voice of America and see what they have to say.

June 14th, 2005 | 81 comments - (Comments are closed)
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