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Samizdata.net will probably be moving away from Moveable Type and to Expression Engine some time in the not too distant future. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has made this move with their own blog or who has experience using Expression Engine. It has been obvious to us for a while that MT is groaning under the weight of Samizdata.net (the comments are agonisingly slow for example) and a full site rebuild now takes about 4 hours! We really do need to move on to something better! July 6th, 2004 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Over on the Social Affairs Unit blog, Michael Mosbacher takes Seamas Milne to task for the idiotic statement in the Guardian that the people fighting the US and UK are the ‘real’ liberation movement in Iraq, not the people who toppled Saddam Hussain. On the broader topic of anti-Americanism however Mosbacher points out that Seamas Milne has a quite a way to go before he reaches the ‘stature’ of that florid friend of tyranny the world over, Harold Pinter, who has long been a pet hate of mine and others on this blog. July 2nd, 2004 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Rob Fisher has discovered a foolproof plan for getting invited to our famed Blogger Bashes… …advertising Samizdata.net at the Glastonbury festival June 30th, 2004 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
David Sucher seems to like to have the last word on his blog City Comforts, and as it is his blog, he gets to call the tune and delete comments as he sees fit. That said, his claim that he only deletes comments which do not have real e-mail addresses is simply untrue. Nevertheless, his blog, his rules. Fair enough, we set our comment editorial policy here on Samizdata.net as we see fit too. I took Sucher to task for what seemed to me to be some vindictive comments aimed at Jackie D, one of the Samizdatistas, regarding comments over on Harry’s Place and on his own blog that were started off by Dick Cheney’s indelicate words on the US Senate floor. My final comment on David Sucher’s blog was deleted, so… this one’s for you, David:
With due regard. June 29th, 2004 | Comments are closed
In that marvellously bonkers publication Pravda, it is being reported that the Ukrainian sports authorities are blaming their lack of medals at a gymnastic event on the fact their Russian rivals brought in people with paranormal abilities to sabotage the Ukrainian competitors.
To hell with the gymnastics! If they can do such things, then they simply must organise special events in which paranormals compete to see who can paralyse the will of the other first! 
No Officer, I am not drunk, I had my will paralysed by Russian paranormals! June 26th, 2004 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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.
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. June 26th, 2004 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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.  June 25th, 2004 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
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.
“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. June 23rd, 2004 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
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?
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’? June 22nd, 2004 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. June 22nd, 2004 | 112 comments - (Comments are closed)
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.
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. June 20th, 2004 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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.
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’. June 20th, 2004 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
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