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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The Home Secretary has instructed the Humberside Police Authority to suspend the chief constable of Humberside, David Westwood. I have no views on the actual issue of David Westwood’s competence and whether or not he actually deserves to be suspended and ultimately sacked, but what is alarming is how Downing Street is centralising more and more decisions on local matters that have a huge baring on civil liberties.
Lawyers for Mr Blunkett are expected to ask the High Court, possibly on Tuesday, for an injunction forcing the authority to carry out his instruction to suspend the officer. This will be the first test of powers under the Police Reform Act 2002 and the Home Secretary will argue that suspension is necessary “for the maintenance of public confidence” in the force.
[..]
Colin Inglis, the chairman of the authority and the Labour leader of Kingston-upon-Hull told BBC1’s Look North: “The police authority is not a rubber stamp and if the Home Secretary expected a rubber stamp then that, I’m afraid, is not what he has got.
“The Home Secretary is not David Westwood’s line manager. David Westwood works for the police authority.
The issue is not “is David Westwood a good copper” but “do you want David Blunkett making those decisions?”. No prizes for guessing where I stand on that.
A few weeks ago when we culled the so-called race realists (neo-fascist racists) that were camping in Samizdata.net’s comment section, it became clear to me that if you let ill mannered loud mouths use your venue to try and shout down discourse and endlessly turn unrelated topics to their pet thesis, all you do is attract more ill mannered loud mouths who will do the same.
Everyone has their techy days in the comment section but when a person makes a habit of being obnoxious and immune to rational argument, I see no reason to indulge them or tolerate them. This is not a forum and this is not a chat room, it is a blog, which is quite different. Many blogs do not even have comment sections.
When you open your house to visitors, you do not give up the right to kick people out if they start insulting other guests and spray painting their opinions on the wall. Of course some people would say, “Oh but that is censorship if you stop them”. Er, no, it is just maintaining control over what is and is not acceptable on your private property… but of course some people, the sort that I am now far quicker to ban, do not actually believe in private property (not when you pin them down), and often cannot see that censorship by the state of private media channels and editorial control over a private media channel (such as a blog, for example) are materially different things. But then to someone who thinks all interaction should be political (the usual term used is ‘democratic’ these days), such distinctions make little difference to them. I am not referring here to specific people but rather the general class from which our ‘problem commenters’ tend to spring.
Some cannot see that they are not being ‘censored’ because of whatever their views are, any more than a man who gets on a table in a restaurant, drops his draws and starts calling for the darkies to be thrown out of Britain or for the middle class to have their homes confiscated is being ‘censored’ when he gets thrown out by a bouncer for being an jackass.
If I have any regrets it is that I have been too indulgent of endlessly poorly argued and often off topic drivel posted by a small minority of serial commenters in the past. I have no objection to vocal dissent from the ‘Samizdata.net world view’ (whatever that is), I just object to a constant stream of unsupported contentions delivered by megaphone that makes no attempt to actually engage in discourse. We have lots of dissenters who comment here regularly that I would not dream of banning.
So yes, there is a new hard line. Trolls and blogroaches will not be indulged and will be ejected rather swifter in future.
Given that Ireland is almost a poster boy for ‘before-and-after’ for what liberalising an economy can do, it is a pity that the people who argue for continuing that process have to couch their words in defensive language. Nevertheless, the Progressive Democrats seems to be making a far better case in Ireland for freeing markets than the pointless British Tories are.
Progressive Democrats president, Mr McDowell, last night issued a rallying call to fellow Ministers to hold to the Government’s liberal economic policy agenda, saying tax-cutting and deregulation have helped transform the State.
[…]
He rejected the accusation that supporters of this way believed in the unleashing of unbridled market forces. “It is the essence of the liberal, republican tradition that the market is the servant and not the master of the people. No one I know argues that Ireland is or should be an economy rather than a society.”
“Market is the servant and not the master of the people”… but what does that actually mean? It seems to me that an economy can be social, but only when it is not political… and Ireland can only ‘be an economy, rather than a society’ if politics (i.e, manipulation of the state) has so much control over what is done as to make the economy simply an adjunct of the state and its political processes, wiping out the economic underpinnings of society and the social underpinnings of markets.
So yes, I am all in favour of people in Ireland living in a society, and the only way to do that is to have a free social market rather than a politically regulated economy.
It seems astonishing that the state still gets involve with the content of TV programming in the USA. I expect this sort of crap in Britain and Europe, but in the USA?
The U.S. Senate on Tuesday approved a measure to crack down on indecency on radio and television by sharply raising fines. The Senate also took steps to rein in the growth of U.S. media companies by invalidating new, more relaxed ownership rules.
Can anyone tell me, do these absurd rules in the USA also apply to other non-terrestrial broadcast media companies, such as cable and satellite TV or even internet ‘radio’?
The seizure of eight British sailors and their small patrol boats by Iranian forces means it is time for the British government to show that unless a swift accommodation is reached, the consequences will be severe for the Iranian state. If the UK forces did indeed stray into Iranian waters, nothing more than a curt apology is due the Iranian state, and only that if they return the British sailors and their equipment without delay. The Iranian state is a vile tyranny and the sooner they are put under real pressure the better.
Of course I would like to see as much instability as possible within Iran regardless of the incident with the sailors. There is no shortage of people in Iran who would love to see the end of theocratic Islamic rule and now would be a good time to start taking advantage of the fact UK and US forces control the Iraqi side of the border. Surely there must be some fairly large stockpiles of weapons from Saddam’s army that have not been blown up and are just sitting around in Iraq…
But if the Iranians want to turn this into a hostage crisis however, the only response should be to use whatever force is required to resolve the situation, not just via anti-regime dissidents but directly by Britain against the Iranian state, and as soon as it is practical. If the theocrats want to engage in brinkmanship, I hope the UK and US will be prepared to not just go to the brink but to step straight over it very forcefully indeed. A nice opening move to the ‘negotiations’ would be to redeploy a division right up to the Iranian border.
Update: Hopefully this will all be over by tomorrow (Thursday). Perhaps the Iranian state decided it was unwise to push things too far. It will be interesting to see if there is any long term fall out from this incident.
David Smith, the economics editor for the Sunday Times, has a splendid article on his personal blog, Economics UK, about why the Eurosceptic approach is the economically rational one.
Britain’s unemployment rate, on a comparable basis, is 4.8%, against 9.4% in France and 9.8% in Germany. Unemployment stands at under half the EU average. Per capita gross domestic product in Britain, according to a new report from Capital Economics, is higher at $30,200 (£16,440), than Germany’s $29,200 or France’s $28,500.
The economic momentum is with us. Britain has been growing continuously for 12 years, during which time other EU countries have suffered at least one recession and in some cases two. The sick man of Europe has made a remarkable recovery.
Of course the economic argument for Britain being in the EU (as opposed to some EFTA-like agreement) was always tosh. Switzerland anyone? It is now highly visible tosh.
Here on Samizdata.net we may decry the regulatory idiocy of the Labour government but clearly things are even worse in Euroland, and at least if more sovereignty is maintained at the UK level, more of the damage can be undone at the UK level rather than locked in by remote stasis oriented Europe wide institutions. All the EU has to offer is corruption, stagnation and regulation. No thanks.
For those who insist that the lack of an Al-Qaeda/Iraq link means Saddam should have been left to mass murder his own people unmolested, Melanie Philips has some measured words for you.
The excitement was over a preliminary assessment of evidence about al-Qa’eda by the US commission investigating September 11. The only problem was that the press coverage was untrue. The report does not rule out links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa’eda. On the contrary, as the commission’s chairman, Thomas Kean, confirmed: “There were contacts between Iraq and al-Qa’eda, a number of them, some of them a little shadowy. They were definitely there.” As so often in the coverage of Iraq, those who make the (illogical) claim that there was no such contact and therefore no cause for war saw in this report only what they wanted to see.
[…]
Bill Clinton’s administration was absolutely certain that Saddam was in cahoots with al-Qa’eda. It was a given. That is surely why, after September 11, Pentagon officials were obsessed with Iraq. Whether Saddam was personally involved in 9/11 was irrelevant; if he was aiding al-Qa’eda’s terror, he had to be stopped. But this has been obliterated from the collective memory in order to place the most malign interpretation possible on the motives of the Bush administration.
Nothing new and from my point of view, so what… that Saddam was a tyrant was enough of a reason for me… but seeing as how people keep repeating ‘there was no link’ (I was highly sceptical myself at first), continue to oppose the overthrow of the Ba’athist regime if you like but please find another approach because ‘that dawg don’t hunt no more’.
I am glad to see I am not the only one who thinks the frequently reported ‘sharp exchanges’ between Blair and Chirac (or Shröder) are a phoney as a three pound note. Some of the commenters here on Samizdata.net seems to have taken a similar view as has the Daily Telegraph opinion leader article.
At EU summits, there is always a row and always a deal – and the European constitution negotiations did not disappoint. Tony Blair’s spin doctors did not quite say, “Gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here,” but he was, apparently, battling like Henry V against the French and also the Germans. But he signed the constitution anyway, even though last week’s election results clearly show he had no mandate to do so. There was something distinctly phoney about the row.
Indeed. The fact having ‘rows’ with the French and Germans is good for the standing of a British leader hardly needs explaining. Yet the fact is that regardless of the acrimony, the deals still seem to get signed. ‘Red line’ after red line gets laid down, acclaimed by both supporters and people who should know better: “Thus far and no further!” cries our plucky Leader of the Day. Which of course really means “only thus far this time“. Just wait a year or two and the process can be repeated yet again and a little more agreed, once the ‘red lines’ of yesteryear have vanished down the memory hole.
Forget the rhetoric, if you want to know the truth, just look for the signatures on the treaties. The rest is just so much verbal fart gas.
I wonder if the fact France is, get this, cracking down on opponents of the theocratic tyranny in Iran will produce howls of anger from the same people who complain that the US has on many occasions propped up unsavoury regimes for various reasons? I have my doubts as most are convinced that if the US is not involved in something, it does not really happen.
Why is the French state doing this? Well who knows… I am sure that fact lucrative deals have been signed in Iran by French companies over the last few months have nothing to do with it. Nope, that could not possibly be the reason.
An EU Constitution has been agreed, sort of, and now a powerful section of the political establishment will begin the process of spinning it as ‘a great victory for Britain’ because it will not immediately wipe out the ability of British people to have at least a little influence over the laws under which they live. And in other parts of Europe, the same constitution will be spun as ‘moving Europe closer to complete union’. It is like a vast edifice growing ever taller by the year, a great movable siege tower surrounded by a fog of graft and corruption and expense accounts.
But it is a constitution quite unlike the more famous US one. The EU constitution will incorporate, amongst other things, the essence of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which requires not that the state refrain from making laws in many areas of life but that laws be mandated to ensure ‘rights’. This includes such wonders as the ‘right to education’ including the phrase “this right includes the possibility to receive free compulsory education” (which is of course not in fact free at all and suggests we have a ‘right to be compelled’). And wonders of double talk such as:
Equality between men and women must be ensured in all areas, including employment, work and pay. The principle of equality shall not prevent the maintenance or adoption of measures providing for specific advantages in favour of the under-represented sex.
So the much awaited document will prohibit discrimination between men and women… unless it is decided to pass laws requiring discrimination between men and woman. Clearly the Charter of Fundamental Rights which the new EU Constitution will aim to enforce is nothing less that the ‘right’ to require all European states to maintain regulatory welfare states. The much vaunted priests of democracy want to make sure that the constitution ensures that all you can vote for is who gets to regulate you rather than whether or not you will be regulated at all.
It is not too late for Britain but the last bastion is indeed the one on which the battle will be fought. Perhaps, just perhaps, when comes time for the UK referendum, that vast and growing tower will be struck by lightning and come crashing down.
I have known for quite a while that the hierarchy of Roman Catholic Church in England has decided that it no longer wishes the Church to be a force for moral suasion but would rather simply act as a political lobby, seeking to use the force of the state to compel behaviour it approves of rather than allow moral choices to remain in hands of thier parishioners (or anyone else for that matter). It is good to see articles in the mainstream press saying much the same thing and holding them up to a spotlight.
I would hope that Roman Catholics who view the political secularisation of their church do not just meekly sit in their pews and listen to the advocacy of coercive statism without a murmur. If the Church wants to act like a political organisation, people should have no compunction treating them like nothing more than that… and there are few ways better to get an institution’s undivided attention than starving it of funds.
If the leaders of the Church in England want the state to take your money regardless of how you feel about that, rather than bending their efforts to urging you to give it to charitable works of you own free will, then might I suggest to Church-goers that they remember that when the collection plate comes around during mass… but do not just decline to part with your funds, tell your priest that you will not do so and why.
The story of the next general election is one of three party politics
Charles Kennedy, Liberal Democrat leader
Sure, Tories, Labour and… UKIP? 
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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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